Katie's Critter Corner

In honor of my beautiful friend Wendell (who got married on August 12), I am posting these rather gross critter pics.


This poor woodpecker woke me up one morning by crashing violently into my bedroom window. I thought it might just be knocked out, but later, I noticed that it was being consumed by adolescent box elder bugs, so it must have been dead. Weeks later, Isaac found the skull and kept it in his "science box". Mmmmm.





Now, this interesting spider is an "Argiope Aurantia". We found her one day in our entryway. She's really big - her leg span is about the size of a silver dollar. I know it's a "she" because of the size. My brave dad picked a tick off the dog and fed it to the spider, and it was so interesting that we decided to leave her along. Sadly, the next morning she was gone, but later that day I discovered her again in the corner of my office. There she has remained.

We feed her twice a day with any bugs we can find. One day, we fed her a huge cricket. I'm not even creeped out by her anymore - I like to feed her and watch her wrap up those nasty bugs with her hind legs. She can even handle huge moths (although we DO put the really big moths in the freezer first to keep them from tearing up the web). After all of this feeding, she's actually gotten fat! I'll try to post a newer picture soon.

When her web gets nasty, she rebuilds it. She includes this interesting zig-zag stripe down the middle, which is apparently there to stabilize it.

Here's a video of her wrapping up the bug for later...



Wendell usually follows her grody critter posts with something cute and fuzzy, but I couldn't come up with anything. Sorry W.~!