Comments

• I am curious to know if garden orb spiders, by instinct, return to the same garden location year after year. I'm not suggesting that over successive years that it's the same spider, because I accept that they have a 12 month life cycle. I ask this because I only ever seen one garden orb spider in our yard (early autumn, in Albany Western Australia) on an annual basis over about five years. Once I relocated this one garden orb spider from my yard (because it was in an inconvenient location) to a neighbors more bushy yard, and while the relocation seemed successful for a week or two, invariably a garden orb spider would fill the same place / location left by the one I relocated. I then tried some back-yard science and placed a small dot of white paint on the top abdoment of the spider (at night when on it's web), then I relocated the spider. To my amazement, I found that after that week to two week absence - the same spider, with the white dot, returned to the same garden locale. I tried this several times and observed that the same (or what appears to be the same spider) retuned. It's 2012, the sixth year from whence I started watching one garden orb spider set up in the same inconvenient location in our front yard, year after year. Yes - it lays a silk egg sack on a brick wall near the gutter. - in also what appears to be the same spot every year (but I often brush it down and place it in the bin). I am just intrigued and left to wonder....