A short visit to Florida last week gave me the opportunity
to check on the progress of the egg sacs that had posed such a mystery a couple of months ago. So many spiderlings had hatched recently that I found miniscule
spiders and their similarly diminutive webs nearly everywhere I looked in the garden.
Many of the young spiders (such as the one pictured below) were easily recognizable as spinybacked orbweavers (Gasteracantha cancriformis).
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| A small spinybacked orbweaver (Gasteracantha cancriformis). |
However, many others were even smaller and simply looked
dark and round. Nevertheless, I was
eventually able to establish that these too were spinybacked orbweavers. As I was looking for thrips on the
ficus hedge, I noticed yellow and green silk sticking up from the back of one
of the leaves. When I turned the leaf over,
some of the silk snagged on a branch, revealing a ball of white silk underneath. Within this inner silk compartment, I could see a mass of spiderlings that had
hatched from their eggs but still remained within the egg sac.
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| A spinybacked orbweaver (Gasteracantha cancriformis) egg sac. |
Once disturbed by my handling of the leaf, some of these spiderlings were
ready to enter the wider world. One by
one, they crawled out of the silk ball, made their way to the edge of the leaf,
and jumped.
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| A spiderling emerging from the egg sac. |
Although I temporarily lost track of the spiderlings once they left the leaf, within minutes I began finding new spider webs
stretched along the ficus hedge.
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