From 8 legs to 440, a Spider Story

Here's our subject, a "daddy longlegs" spider, pholcus phalangioides.  Often found roaming in houses, laying a nearly invisible silk trail wherever they go, they find a quiet hidden spot to rest up for the winter.  Their only sustenance during that period is anything that happens to cross their path, often one of their own species which has been disturbed from it's resting place.  This one I disturbed during an autumn clearout of cupboards, so I put her into  a jam jar (USA, jelly) which she immediately took a liking too as a safe place in which to settle down.    Over the weeks as I came upon another of the species I placed it in the jar on a "best man wins" basis, but this one consistently won and ate the others.   Eventually one brave male made mating advances and was successful, but she still ate it afterwards just the same.  More regular meals followed including a fat moth and her abdomen swelled considerably.

Here's that swelling, and along the flank of the abdomen you can clearly see a cluster of eggs which resulted from that mating, there's a similar group on the other flank.  Although she had become very tame with me before, at this stage she was very nervous, tending to face me and hide her abdomen, hence the poor  quality  of  this  snatched  shot.

On March 30th she laid her eggs and in customary fashion for this species, gathered them in a silk linked cluster which would be carried in her mouth throughout the incubation period of a lunar month.  During this time these mothers never eat, behaviour very different from many spiders which merely abandon their egg clusters straight  after  laying.

Eighteen days later the spiderlings are well developed in the eggs, one of which I've enlarged to show it's eight  legs  developing.

And here's the eggs at 27 days, almost ready for hatching.   You can see the the mother's translucent abdomen is virtually empty after starving herself for all this time, real dedication to the young.

Now, coming up to midnight on April 27th, the hatching starts and a forest of  little  legs  start  to  appear.

The fully hatched brood have nearly all taken up position on the silk canopy that the mother has spun for them while she stands guard.  The last few spiderlings have just emerged and can be seen on the silk cocoon at lower right that their eggs were attached to.

Here the starving mother eats some of the silk of the cocoon to assuage her hunger and recover it's valuable protein.   Over the next three days I supplied her with two of her own species and a fly, which completely replenished her food sac.

Some of the tiny spiderlings, all born with full food sacs and content to stay put with mum for as long  as  possible.

And here's a close up of one of them, only a tiny speck on the camera screen so  the  quality  is  naturally  impaired.

This is the jam jar photographed from the outside after the hatching.  With the mother below, the spiderlings are the little white specks, illustrating the difficulty of photographing them with an ordinary pocket camera, the one shown below which took all the shots.

POSTSCRIPT.   Several days after the hatching, a stable period of a few warm days was forecast, so I wedged the opened jar into a fork of a dense laurel hedge outside for the family to make their way in the world.  Nothing doing, after two days none of them had budged.  The mother had clearly decided that she had it made where she was, regular food deliveries, a toy boy delivered at an opportune moment and her family with her in a warm and secure home, why move?   Of course I had to force the issue and coax her out, first with a stick to bring her forward and then with my finger.  It was then that she showed how tame she had become, putting up with me pushing her abdomen while resisting going out.   Any normal spider would have run at the first contact, but she was totally unafraid.   I was able to gather up the silk canopy with the spiderlings attached and place it on a leaf by the mother with only some of the young tangled in it, much less attrition  than  they  would  normally  have  suffered  in  the  wild.

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