Around the middle of May, a friend had sent me an image of a couple of spider webs on a small conifer tree; they were sheet-type webs that were woven horizontally, taking on a little bit of a bowl shape. They were arranged one on top of the other, separated by a foot or so vertically.

They appeared to be separate webs, each tended to by a spider. My first impression upon viewing the picture was that the tree formed a “high-rise” community for spiders.

A couple of weeks later and a few counties south of home, while walking in a field on state land, I saw the same type of web as in the image my friend sent. I was able to walk close enough to see that the horizontal bowl web had another horizontal web, albeit thinner, directly under the top web. This bowl-shaped web on top of a saucer-shaped web—or “doily”—is the hallmark of an aptly named species of spider.

The bowl and doily spider (Frontinella pyramitela) is an abundant species of spider in the region. This spider is small, only 4 millimeters in length. The species is mostly brown with white markings on the abdomen. The distinctive bowl- and saucer-shaped webs are several inches wide. Webs can be found on tall grass, branches or even on man-made material. The bowl and doily spider’s habitat includes fields, forests and yards.

This species does not use a sticky coating on its web as other spider species do. Instead, they wait for their prey—typically gnats or other flying insects—to collide with overhead web strands and fall into the web. The bowl and doily spider will then run on the bottom side of the bowl to the prey and bite through small openings in the web to envenomate the hapless insect. The bottom “doily” web helps protect the spider as well as to provide a storage space for prey-item caching for later consumption. 

There are many types of spiders that can be seen outside, and most of the time, you can identify them by the web they make rather than seeing the spider itself.  The bowl and doily spider makes a unique web that earned this species its name. The species tends to be somewhat communal, so there may be more than one bowl-and-doily web in the area.