Appreciating spiders is a tricky business for an arachnophobe

ANOTHER LIFE: THERE WAS that scene in Great Expectations (we oldies saw the first film, in 1946) where Pip was summoned to Miss Havisham’s room, where the wedding cake was slowly crumbling amid her broken dreams. Like everything else, it was shrouded in cobwebs, and, as Dickens wrote it, “speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies” ran around it on the tablecloth. I have edited those out of memory, but the room’s veils of cobweb remain.

As the summer drizzles away, our spiders are celebrating this year’s remake of the film (featuring Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham) by dressing the house like a studio set. Their gauzy hammocks swing around the kitchen, blur corners of the living room, and drape the ceiling above the living-room lights on the nights when we’re having friends in. We bought one of those yokes for vacuuming the car, initially for cleaning the books, but now also for sucking up as many webs as I can see. The spiders wait until I’ve finished, then creep out to start spinning again.

As a recovering arachnophobe, size matters. In the loo, I can watch with equanimity as pale and fragile Pholcidae, their long legs scarcely pencilled in against the window, stalk midges in webs strung almost at random.

The webs that shroud windowsill bric-a-brac – sea-urchins, bird skulls, fossils from Aran – seem to belong to tiny spiders that follow their handiwork into the nozzle. I have left, for the moment, a dense funnel-web in one corner, its depths strung with moth-wings like scraps of Hermès scarves. There’s a dark hole at the bottom, drilled to admit the broadband aerial, and I fear it may house Tegenaria domestica, the barn spider that comes indoors.

This is the common horror that stalks abroad in autumn to pose on stark arenas of wall or ceiling, to be dashed at with kitchen towelling, smothered and flushed down the loo. There are people who “rescue” spiders with a tumbler and a piece of card, and deposit them tenderly in the garden, but I have yet to graduate to such proper regard. At least I no longer whinny and summon Ethna from her desk.

Autumn, on the other hand, can also conjure the spectacle I first encountered down at the swans’ lake behind the shore, where vertical threads of spider silk shimmered above the water, a gauzy, sunlit curtain waving against the darkness of the cliff. And a reader once wrote to Eye on Nature about his surreally beautiful sight in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, when “what I took to be the low winter sun reflecting off waterlogged ground turned out to be an infinity of strands of silk stretched across the grass as far as the eye could see. Close by, they shimmered in the sunlight like a moonlit sea, and as I watched I saw additional strands drift along over the ground until snagged on a blade of grass.”

All this was gossamer, depositing thousands of diminutive, ballooning Linyphiid spiders (“money spiders” in childhood’s litany of good-luck portents). Darwin found thousands of these little red spiders covering the rigging of HMS Beagle as it lay 100km off the coast of Argentina. On land, he also watched the behaviour described in my spider book (a Hamlyn one, packed with close-up photographs I cannot bear to consult).

A spider intent on ballooning climbs to a high point, such as the top of a fence, and turns to face into the wind. It extrudes several strands of silk and then, when the wind is strong enough to lift them, stands on tiptoe and lets go the grip of its little claws. It’s not just adult Linyphiids that use this method of dispersal – other small adults and the young of many species go ballooning, often for great distances, as late as December. They have been caught at every altitude up to 4,500 metres, but most seem content to skim the highest trees.

Blowing in to Ireland on a silken strand was one way for spiders to colonise the island after the Ice Age. Working out which species arrived that way, and which might have been tucked into bird feathers or Neolithic currachs, which hitched a lift on driftwood, or crept back from some offshore refuge, awaits its turn for research.

DNA analysis is already changing the story of the origins of many of Ireland's species, and is also suggesting which mammals, amphibians and insects really deserve to be called "native". This has inspired a second conference on Ireland's post-glacial biodiversity, Mind the Gap II, to be held at Fota Wildlife Park on September 1st and 2nd (booking is at fotawildlife.ie/mind-the-gap).

In a keynote paper, mammalogist Dr Paddy Sleeman of UCC will discuss growing evidence for a wooded Irish ecosystem surviving the Ice Age, somewhere to the south of the island.

Eye on nature

I recently discovered a ragwort plant in my garden with three upright stems. Vertically along each stem ants had made their nest, about 2cm deep and 15cm in length. Are they moving out of the soil because it is too wet?

Pat Ferguson, Ashford, Co Wicklow

What you have on the stems of the ragwort are “sheds” built by the ants, in which they farm aphids, which they milk for the sugary honeydew that they secrete.

In June I discovered a number of rosemary beetles on lavender plants in the shared garden where I live. I reported them to the National Biodiversity Data Centre in Waterford and was informed that they are an invasive species and have only been recorded in Ireland for the first time this year.

Cathal Black, Churchtown, Dublin

You should also report them to invasivespeciesireland.com.

I have noticed what appears to be dog droppings around the place. They are left neatly on a bunch of leaves or on a collection of twigs, and recently on the cover of a deck chair. Could it be a fox?

Seamus Fox, Clonmore, Co Carlow

It sounds more like a pine marten, which deposits on an elevation such as you describe.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address