When I looked closer, I found that it was a nest of tiny spiders that must have just hatched out of their egg case.
Just Hatched |
However, two exceptions to this Spider Tolerance Policy are Black Widow Spiders and Brown Widow Spiders. The Brown Widows in particular seem to love our front porch, building their messy webs all over the railings around the porch and all over the porch furniture, the porch light and pretty much anything else they can use to anchor their webs. Their egg sacs are white spheres covered with spiky protrusions; there was an empty sac and another full one just next to where these tiny spiders were, so we knew that's what they were.
We joke that we contract out our Halloween decorations to the spiders because they use locally sourced, organic webbing, but there were just too many of these Brown Widows, so that was the last of them.
We'll leave the decorating to the Orb Weavers, one of whom seems to have designs on entrapping our car.
More on local spiders: http://waynesword.palomar.edu/redmite.htm