Fleet-footed spiders

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but spiders are becoming popular at this time of the year.

Not everybody is fond of them, though -they build little webs everywhere and create long silk strands that stick to paint, weatherboards and window panes.

Of course, all spiders are pretty useful predators in our gardens and in our forests; their consumption of plant pests should be welcomed by gardeners.

An old, but still cool statistic from the UK gives us some idea of the predation potential of spiders in that country: On an annual basis, all spiders in the UK eat so much insect/invertebrate meat as the equivalent total weight of the human population in that good old country we know and love as England!

That’s impressive stuff, don’t you think? But not all spiders spin a web to catch their prey. Some species are just fast runners and grab their prey “on the hoof” so to speak.

Avondale Spiders, for instance, love to live inside your home, hiding behind pictures and paintings on the wall, during the day. Outside they prefer to hide under flakes of bark

In the evening they emerge and go hunting; their target is medium to large sized moths, caterpillars, even cockroaches – and they’re all run down with stealth and speed.

While Avondale spiders are quite restricted in their distribution in New Zealand (they are originally Ozzies that emigrated in the parcels of Australian timber from which the Avondale racecourse was built), another Ozzie interloper is now wide-spread in Aotearoa.

The Fleet-footed spider runs everywhere fast; it is a medium-sized black spider with small white markings and two long, orange front legs – quite remarkable and easy to spot.

They love to live on your patio and your deck; When the concrete is hot in the sun, their speed is extra-ordinary (hence their name). Watch them go – and if kids are interested in physics and maths: film the beasties and time their run between to measurable land-marks. Now calculate the speed in meters per second of this remarkable and fast arachnid!

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