On our first and only rainy day in February 2026 I came across this strange structure or web out in a Florida field. It is made of spider silk which at first seems random, but upon closer inspection, clearly is not. There is a method to the madness.
This is the web of a spider known as the Bowl and Doily Weaver, and the webs are built by the females. The male lives in the web as well as the female, beneath the bowl shaped upper deck that serves as a trap for insects.
Bowl and Doily spiders are very small, but they are extremely beneficial, catching annoying gnats and mosquitos. The female produces a lot of silk, and I suppose the male probably can as well, but for some reason which I will have to look up, he apparently doesn’t contribute much, if anything, to the web building process.
The two-part web is both home and trap. The upper part, the “bowl” serves to catch insects, usually very small ones like gnats or mosquitos, which are knocked down into the bowl-like structure by nearly invisible random silk threads secured over the web. (You can see these obstacle threads in my photographs because the fine raindrops highlight them.)
When the insects fly into the threads, they tumble into in the bowl, and the spiders below the bowl tear through the web from below to ambush the insects. This unique web design allows the spiders to work out of the direct sight of predators, unlike a conventional orb weaver web.
The male captures about a third of the prey, from what I have read. Since in most spider species the male is smaller than the female, it may simply be that the male can only handle the smallest prey items and perhaps the suitably small ones only constitute about a third of the catch.
I cannot verify this and didn’t even find the spiders in the web this time, but will keep an eye out for them in the future to see what the differences between the sexes. Meanwhile, perhaps you too can spot some of these tiny engineers on your next nature walk.
—- Sue, March 1, 2026