It’s been a good year for wasp spiders.
In the past I’ve always been so focussed on the spider that I overlooked the web, but this year I saw so many of the spiders that I started looking out for their webs and notices that some had a zigzag pattern like a runway.
It’s really hard to get a photograph but I’ve looked it up and it isn’t an anomaly; they all have it… So what is it for?
Two papers by Craig et al. 1990 and Kim et al. (2012) describe it reflecting UV light to trick pollinating insects like flies and bees into flying directly into the trap.
Not a lot of people know that… but now we do…
