Saint Andrew's Cross Spider

Description:

Male 5mm<> Female 30mm. Found in circular vertical webs that are not quite as elegant as Nephila or Eriophera. The webs may often have a cross woven in the middle and the spider will extend its arms in four rays to each arm of the cross while it sits in the middle. Some people think it attracts flying insects, others think it may warn birds about the web so they do not break it.

Habitat:

This species were the most common species in my Garden. They enjoyed the regular water, lack of disturbance and large number of anchor points for their webs. One year there were Argiope of all ages layered right through the Bromeliad potted gardens with as many as twenty specimen over a metre sq

Notes:

I managed to shoot a few minutes of a deadly mating dance that took hours to complete. This is a small scattering of those images