We have a big ol’ composter thingy out back (of course we have a composter: we’re Puget Sound liberals. It’s even made from recycled plastic) next to the hose bib. An area so boutiful in potential fly-fodder–food scraps, coffee grounds, you know, icky stuff–is bound to attract spiders, and there’s a real beaut that’s staked out a spot between the composter and the wall of the house. By some miracle, it did not choose to anchor its web to the lid of the bin, so yesterday I was able to haul out and dispose of a pail of kitchen waste without tearing the thing’s home asunder. That always makes me a little sad.

The particular spider fell into the category I generally refer to as “chunk of Granola” shaped. Hairless, dun-colored , nominally spherical carapace with all kinds of seemingly-random bumps, jigs and truncated spines on it. If you saw it on your breakfast table you would assume that it got away while you were pouring your morning Granola and you’d pop it right back in the bowl with the others. Then you would notice the legs and promptly vomit into your erstwhile breakfast.

Anyways, this particular spider was in luck; opening and subsequently dumping the contents of my pail into the composter resulted in a cloud–well, let’s say a mist–of fruit flies, frenetically trying to get out of the way of the avalanche of new comestibles. A number of them chose to head for the comparative safety of the wall of the house. A few of them passed through the gossamer strands of the spider’s lair, one got stuck.

This did not escape the notice of the web’s proprietor, who promptly pivoted on its axis, scuttled down to the trapped fly, and swallowed it whole.

Swallowed it whole?

I must profess, I did not imagine a spider was actually capable of digesting solid prey. If someone had pointed a gun to the President’s head and demanded that I tell him whether spiders have actual mouth parts I would–oh, come on, I’m not a complete monster–I would hesistate for just a second before replying that sure, spiders probably have more going on in the mouth department than just a pair of fangs used to hoover up the liquefied remains of their poisoned prey. But the typical mental picture one gets is of a creature that injects powerful dissolving chemicals into the body of its victims, then sucks them dry. Nowhere in that very basic frame of reference does an actual opening, closing, mouth-type mouth come into play.

In fact, as I was to learn during my exhaustive search of a single Wikipedia entry, some spiders are actually capable of masticating their dinner, squooshing out all the yummy liquid nutrients and leaving the indigestible bits behind. So in all likelihood, given the tiny size of a fruit fly, our eight-legged friend popped its breakfast into its mouth, munched on it until all the fruit-fly-y goodness was down the hatch, and spit out the rest. Had I been more attentive, I probably would have been able to hear the faintest “ptooie!” as it ejected the remains.

So that was the first thing I’d never seen a spider do. The second is, well, less “National Geographic” in nature.

As the spider finished its meal, it returned to the nexus of its web. There, with great deliberation, it reached out with its hindmost limb on its right hand side….and scratched its ass.

Due to patterns of sexual dimorphism in order Araneae, one normally assumes that the large spiders out doing the real work are the females. And yet, for some reason, I can only imagine this particular arachnid as being a guy.