I have to follow up my last post because a few days after I wrote it, I looked really close at the plant where the Green Lynx (Peucetia viridans) placed her egg sac. Spiderlings!

Green Lynx spiderlings

…and here’s a close-up:

I was so excited to see the resounding success of these beautiful spiders. I saw the mom, perched atop her egg sac – a little shrunken, I thought. Then she moved! I thought she had starved, standing guard over her eggs, but there she was – probably agitated by my hovering over her and her babies. Apparently, I am lucky she didn’t spit at me. I found a fascinating study about the egg sacs and how they fare with and without guarding mom-spiders. The study was performed on this same species – here’s a link if you would like to read it: Green Lynx Spider Egg Sacs: Sources of Mortality and the Function of Female Guarding.¹ I rushed inside to get my camera, and found the mom-spider on the move when I returned.

She moved all around her web, seeming to tidy this and that strand, making sure everything was secure. I got a decent photo of her spinnerets in this next photo, though I can’t tell if she was spinning any silk at that moment:

Right on cue, the mom-spider moved back to her spiderlings to pose for a family photo:

How about that? Pretty darn cool, I’d say.

If a bird swooped in and plucked that spider right up to eat it…I think I would have cried. (not really – but you know what I mean) And I love birds! Yet Mother Nature is practically defined by the fact that its creatures can only survive at the expense of one another. And it all works. It seems to me that many, if not most, of Mother Nature’s creatures know how to exist on the planet without driving each other to extinction. I think we should sit up and take notes, don’t you?

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