From the Texas Wildscape book: This large, colorful, and extremely visible creature is one of the more familiar spiders found in the garden. The striped spiders construct large, vertical, orb-shaped webs which had a characteristic zigzag pattern running down the center. Called a "stabilimentum," this structure was once thought to provide stability to such a large web. Scientists now speculate that the structure is an adaptive device which makes the web more visible to larger animals, such as birds, which might otherwise move through the web and destroy it. The Argiopes are especially beneficial creatures, and should be treasured in any Wildscape.