Spider alert!

Denzil, in this week’s Nature Photo Challenge, asks us to hunt for spiders and their webs – something that it’s easy to do at this time of year in Britain. Only yesterday, a huge specimen was standing guard over the shoe-rack. But by the time I’d got my camera, he’d vanished. These then, are all archive photos, and unidentified. Helpful suggestions welcomed.

The first one is from India. Perhaps I J Khanewala can help? And the second is also not from England, but from La Rioja in Spain.

The third is from Masham Parish Church, and it’s dead. Is it even a spider?

For the rest, I offer a gallery of webs, mainly taken on misty moisty mornings, or in fog, lending them a mysterious and often ethereal quality.

These were taken in Dumfries and Galloway, in Cairnsmore of Fleet National Nature Reserve. As is the header photo.

The next group come from just down the road, near Sleningford Hall.

And lastly, we return to India, where a tunnel spider has made his complex lure.

Tunnel spider’s nest

Snapshot Sunday: a resilient spider’s web

Google spiders’ webs and you’ll find any number of scientific articles celebrating the resilience of the silken strands that spiders produce   Not only is the silk stronger than steel, it’s springy and elastic.  The design of the web ensures that even when a strand is broken, the overall formation remains sound.

I found a spider’s web on a recent cold and frosty morning.  By rights such a delicate structure should have collapsed under the weight of its coating of thick icy rime.  It hadn’t.  It’s the perfect candidate for this week’s WordPress photo challenge: resilient.

sleningforddecembercobweb

And here are a few more shots from a cold and frosty morning in North Yorkshire: