SPIDERS IN MY MIRROR

Beside being very useful to me as a driver, the side-view mirrors of my car are also home to some interesting arachnids.

I don't know when exactly this cohabitation started. From today's perspective, it looks that is here forever ... but is surely no older than my history with this car, bought in 2008.

With the life span of most spiders being about a year or two, surely many generations of spiders have inhabited the casings of these mirrors ... and they weren't always of the same species. Here, on the photographs taken during the summer of 2016, you can see two juvenile Neoscona adianta spiders, one in each mirror, and by that I mean not only reflected in the mirror but also using the space behind the mirror as a shelter.
When the car is standing still for hours, and that's the case most of the time, the spiders build their webs in front of the mirror and get their food that way. When I'm driving around, webs get often destroyed or damaged by the strong winds created by the motion. That's not a big problem because my arachnid co - drivers can rebuild them pretty fast.

When the machine is speeding around, the spiders are hidden in the safety of the large, comfortable casing that holds the mirror ...

... and so the daily routines of these spiders are strictly connected with my own.

We're all in the same boat, so to say.

And that's all for today ... some old photographs and an old story that is still going on.

As always in these posts on HIVE, the photographs are my work.