Things Change

I shared the other day that we had to take Teddi to the animal shelter in Galesburg due to her ongoing mistreatment of Lily Lu. She was placed in the shelter on Thursday morning and on Saturday afternoon was placed with a new family. She will be their only pet and she should get along just fine. Here are some pictures of her with her new family.

We hope Teddi has a long and happy life with her new family.

We are back on Tybee Island and learning that when you are gone for a long time things happen in your absence. Carol noticed this outside our back door and I had to do some research to figure out what it was. As a frame of reference it is about 3 inches in length.

This beauty is Nephila clavipes commonly known as the Banana Spider. The two sexes are highly sexually dimorphic with the females significantly larger than the males. Females are one to three inches in length and the males are about one half inch in length.The females build orb webs that average 2+ feet in diameter and may range from three to six feet in daimeter. The silk of a mature female has a yellow tint and shows as a rich gold in sunshine. The silk is very strong and surpasses the strength of Kevlar fiber used in bulletproof vests. It is six times stronger than steel. Because of its size many assume this spider is dangerous to people. It is considered medically harmless to humans. It will only bite if held or pinched and the bite causes localized pain which is less severe than a bee sting. The web and spider shown above are just to the side of our back door.

The sticks in the lower left portion of the picture above are suspended in the spider web. This gives you an idea of the size of the web and its strength. The Banana spider is one of the largest non-trantula-like spiders in North America. To make the size clearer to my northern friends, it is similiar in size to the yellow and black garden spider.