Hundreds of spiderlings

Last October, I found a spider's egg case under the eaves of the outhouse at Oyster Bay. I had a plastic jar in the car, and I trapped it inside, brought it home and stored it outside in a couple of flowerpots to keep it cool, but not likely to freeze. When the weather warmed up a couple of weeks ago, I brought it inside so I could keep an eye on it.

For a few days, I could see the spiderlings inside their case, moving about. Then one morning, they were all out and filling the jar with tiny webs.

Some of the spiderlings, seen through the plastic. The blue at the top is the lid. The pale yellow mass in back is the empty egg case.

The plastic was clear enough to even see the eye arrangement on one of the spiders:

Zooming in. Going by the egg case, the shape, the eye arrangement, and the black triangular patch on their abdomens, these are baby cross spiders, Araneus diadematus.

I took the jar outside and left the lid off. Today, five days later, all the spiderlings have moved on. I'll probably find some, later in the summer, inside my house, eating mosquitoes and fruit flies. They're welcome to them.