Sometimes one finds small orbwebs less than a foot in diameter suspended between the tips of shrubs in wooded clearings. No spider is in sight. But one of the web's radial threads will almost certainly lead to a leaf a little away that has been rolled up to form a retreat bound by strong silk. In this funnel fiddles and feeds the kidney garden spider with its green-yellow legs and prosoma and a distinctive abdomen with a dark bean-shaped spot surrounded by shiny guanocytes. Appearing as a mosaic of crystalline patterns, these cells lie just below the epidermis and serve as repositories for protein metabolites, particularly guanine which fully reflects all incoming light to appear a stark and shiny white. Insects that plunder into the sticky spiral are issued a silken invite into the spider's parlour to be tied up tight and sucked dry with no hope of a happy ending...
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