Unfortunately it was an absolutely prolific breeding year for the praying mantises. This year’s praying mantises were almost exclusively male so hopefully next year will be a less prolific year for these iron fisted demons but this year it was a full time job killing 5 or 6 praying mantises a day just in the ones that had climbed up on the porch to try to behead the visible orb weavers i had sitting in their webs. Eventually every single one i knew of was beheaded and discarded in the grass beneath their web, the signature handiwork of the despicable praying mantises that eats their prey alive and squirming slowly, one bite at a time, and wastes everything but the brain. It was just too much of a job for me to keep these things at bay and eventually the ones on the porch, the greenhouse, the shed, and the carport fell prey to the relentless and ever present danger of hundreds of praying mantises.
After the first couple light freezes, the praying mantises seemed to show up less frequently and their numbers dropped off. This is when i found my second batch of spider buddies. There were 4. One got eaten, and then there were 3. One on the house porch, one on the greenhouse porch, and one on the well house door. Yesterday i found a sizable female praying mantis in the compost bucket sitting on the greenhouse porch stalking that spider quietly and hoping i wouldnt notice its head and arms peeking out of the orange home depot bucket. I got the salt canister out of the greenhouse and smashed it to death. For now, that spider is still alive and kicking but it is a full time job just keeping these buddies around in the environment we are living in. This town must have done something terrible long ago to be plagued with the amount of grasshoppers, locusts, katydids, ravens, scorpions, snakes, mice, poisonous frogs, and praying mantises it has because one town over there are regular, not biblical, amounts of these things. It’s a curious phenomenon how the populations are of reasonable ratio in one area and disproportionate amounts in another.
I should mention that the orb weavers on the porch have now put egg sacs in the kitchen window and the kitchen behind the sink 2 years in a row at this point and two of the spiders living in the kitchen actually made their own tiny egg sacs so i am not just a spider grandmother now but a great grandmother to spotted orb weaver babies that hatched in my kitchen… i have to carefully check and remove nearly microscopic orb weaver spiders from the blender, kitchen utensils, toaster oven, dish washing soap bottle, and sink before using them and they’ve webbed up nearly everything in the kitchen but the stove and 3 corners of the sink but i have decided to live in peaceful coexistence with them rather than serve eviction notices because i’d rather have the orb weavers than a clean kitchen and logically, the webbing is just how they hunt. To destroy it throws a monkey wrench into their ability to get something to eat. So, we have an agreement. I remove their webs from the stove, blender, and kitchen utensils. They put them everywhere else in the kitchen. They stick to the kitchen area and dont branch out. I try not to smoosh them accidentally and try my best to preserve their webs in areas of the kitchen i dont use daily and they eat all the fruit flies and moths that come in when i open the door.
I have to have some kind of boundary. Only orb weavers are allowed in the house. The grass and wolf spiders have to stay outside. But, its a good thing i live alone because a partner would not put up with half the kitchen consumed in webbing so that thousands of tiny orb weavers could survive the winter and not fall prey to praying mantises. They would not probably desire to live like me…half immersed in nature at all times to the point where we’re not sure how animal and how human i am just by looking at my dwelling.