You are probably dealing with Hortophora transmarina, the “Australian garden orb weaver spider”, though you probably don’t call it Australian in Australia.
I always thought they were very considerate spiders because they are nocturnal and, as you said, build a new web every night. So they actually take it down during they day. Most orb-weavers won’t do that for you.
Some of them are definitely those, but we get a bunch of different ones.
The night thing is polite, until you come home after dark one day, and there is limited light on a pathway. Keep in mind that wintertime daylight hours makes that “most of the time” in many places too.
You’ll be tiredly fumbling for your keys while peering carefully to see the reflections of webs, and they’re completely unpredictably placed because of the nightly rebuilding. Your morning memory of their location is now useless. This was admittedly a much bigger problem before mobile phone flashlights were a thing.
The more permanent web-builders you can at least reliably coax into more convenient places with a little bit of strategic web destruction. You might get a badly placed solitary structural web strand from that spider the next day, but those are not sticky and usually spider-free.
It wouldn’t be such a bother if paths weren’t one of their favourite places to build. And they didn’t have widespread communities that have thrived with human occupation.
![[OC] Orb Spider (Araneus diadematus)](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/98132191-3b4c-461c-bc05-2b1f0ff459c9.jpeg){kind=link}
You are probably dealing with Hortophora transmarina, the “Australian garden orb weaver spider”, though you probably don’t call it Australian in Australia.
I always thought they were very considerate spiders because they are nocturnal and, as you said, build a new web every night. So they actually take it down during they day. Most orb-weavers won’t do that for you.
Some of them are definitely those, but we get a bunch of different ones.
The night thing is polite, until you come home after dark one day, and there is limited light on a pathway. Keep in mind that wintertime daylight hours makes that “most of the time” in many places too.
You’ll be tiredly fumbling for your keys while peering carefully to see the reflections of webs, and they’re completely unpredictably placed because of the nightly rebuilding. Your morning memory of their location is now useless. This was admittedly a much bigger problem before mobile phone flashlights were a thing.
The more permanent web-builders you can at least reliably coax into more convenient places with a little bit of strategic web destruction. You might get a badly placed solitary structural web strand from that spider the next day, but those are not sticky and usually spider-free.
It wouldn’t be such a bother if paths weren’t one of their favourite places to build. And they didn’t have widespread communities that have thrived with human occupation.