A Trip to the Natural History Museum's Spider Pavilion

It's that creepy, crawly time of year, and the Natural History Museum's Spider Pavilion is back to celebrate our multi-legged pals.

Held in the same place where just a month earlier butterflies roamed, now the museum has let loose some mighty big spiders to do their thing. Visitors get up close to the spiders and their webs, but there's still room to walk. Here's some details:

Our open-air Spider Pavilion, under a white tent on the Museum's South Lawn, is a place where visitors can marvel at hundreds of spiders spinning their intricate webs. This year’s Pavilion will showcase, in its redesigned anteroom exhibit, several tarantulas and eight-eyed jumping spiders like this one!

The Pavilion's collection of colorful eight-legged creatures includes more than 300 arachnid inhabitants, such as golden silk spiders, Nephila clavipes, whose web of yellow threads can reach six feet wide and whose silk is as strong as steel. Pavilion-goers will also be captivated by spiky orb-weavers Gasteracantha geminata and the day-glo-colored orchard spiders Leucauge venusta.

The Museum's Gallery Interpreters regularly monitor the creatures' webs to make sure there’s ample space between branches to provide optimal web-spinning options. Those blue-shirted staff members will be on hand to explain the intricate web architecture and engineering, and provide more details about spiders that are spinning around neighborhoods, near and far, this fall.

Some pics from our visit:





















We also made our way through the regular portion of the museum, where the Blogger Kids still enjoy checking out the dinosaur exhibit:



And of course, I enjoy the "Creating LA" exhibit, including this massive model of downtown Los Angeles, as it looked in the late 1930s:





Each visit to the Spider Pavilion requires a timed-ticket for an additional fee in addition to the entrance fee: $5 for adults, youth and seniors, and $3 for children (museum members receive free admission). The Spider Pavilion is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm, with the last ticket sold at 4:30 pm.