Silk spinner

If it weren't for cold, rainy days, my computer files would be a complete mess. Good thing it rains here a lot!

Sorting last year's photos today, I looked at two spider photos from Oyster Bay last October. And I noticed something I didn't see at the time: in one of the photos, the spider mama is showing off her spinnerets!

Spider, egg case, sowbugs on the bottom of a log.

I had turned over this log to see what was hiding. And besides the usual sowbugs, there was a large spider's egg case, with the mother standing guard. But she decided I was too big to challenge, and ran away. I got her photo as she left.

See the spinnerets? Tiny, hair-like tubes protruding from her rear.

Spiders produce their silk from these spinnerets; according to the species, they may have from two to four pairs, each producing its own specialized silks. From this photo, I think Ma here has either two or three pairs of spinnerets.

Spider silk has many uses, and each variety of silk has its own special qualities. Even for the common orb web, the spider 

"... pieces together a minimum of four types of silk, each having a different form and function. One silk provides strength, another flexibility, and still another a scaffold to aid the spider during construction." (from "Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating"

But there are more things to do with silk, it makes a warm blanket for spider eggs and spiderlings. It serves as bungee cords, waterproofing, rappelling rope, wind catchers for ballooning spiderlings, cords for snagging, trapping, wrapping, toting prey. Den liners and trap doors, bubbles for underwater living, distant warning systems, gift wrapping ... the uses are endless.

And do the spiders make art? Do they know the beauty of a dew-laden orb web? Does a cross spider sit back and look at her web and feel a justified pride? Who's to tell?

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Si no fuera por los dias de lluvia, los archivos de mi computadors estarían una maraña imposible de desenredar. ¡Un beneficio de este clima!

Hoy, mientras llovía encima de la nieve de anoche, revisé fotos del año pasado. Viendo fotos de octubre, tomadas en Oyster Bay, me di cuenta de algo que no había notado en ese momento. En una de las fotos, una araña madre nos enseña sus hileras.

Fotos: primero, la araña como la encontré cuando volteé un tronco en el suelo; la araña, su saco de huevos, y un grupo de cochinillas.

Había volteado el tronco para ver que manera de cosas escondía y sorprendí esta madre cuidando sus huevos. No se sintió capaz de enfrentarme, y se escapó, no sin que le sacara la foto desde atrás.

Segunda foto; ¿Ves las hileras? Son tubitos miniaturos que se abren desde el final de su abdomen..

Las arañas producen su seda a partir de estas hileras; según la especie, pueden tener de dos a cuatro pares de hileras, y cada uno produce sus sedas especializadas.

Esta seda tiene muchos usos diferentes, y cada variedad tiene sus aplicaciones especiales. Hasta para la telaraña en espiral, la araña ...

"teje juntos un mínimo de cuatro tipos de seda, cada de las cuales tiene forma y función diferentes. Una seda provee fuerza, otra flexibilidad, y otra se usa como andamio para ayudar durante la construcción. (Del libro "Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating")

Pero hay más. La seda puede formar una cobija calientita para los huevos y las hijas arañitas. Sirve como cuerda de bungee, impermeabilización, cuerdas para montañismo (en miniatura), atrapavientos para arañitas que van volando para encontrar un nuevo hogar, cuerdas para cazar, capturar, envolver, cargar su presa. Recubrimiento para las paredes de su cueva o túnel, puertas escondidas, sistemas de burbujas para vivir bajo el agua, sistemas de alerta distante, envoltura para regalos ... Hay mil y un usos.

¿Y será que las arañas producen arte? ¿Conocen la belleza de una telaraña en espiral llena de joyas del rocío del amanecer? ¿Será posible que una araña Diadematus se echa para atrás para mirar su telaraña, sintiendo un orgullo bien justificado? ¿Quién puede saber?

Canned spiders

I found a spider egg case tied to the bottom of my bedside table. I disapproved of the mother's choice of location, and transferred the case to a small canning jar. A week later, they hatched.

Better here than by my bed.

Stripy little critters. I can't identify the species at this stage.

The egg sac looks like a cross spider's (Araneus diadematus) sac, but freshly hatched cross spiderlings are bright yellow with a black patch at the rear. And I have seen no cross spiders inside the house this year.

And then I took the lid off the jar and set it in a warm corner outside.

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Encontré un saco de huevos de araña colgado debajo de mi mesa de noche. No estuve de acuerdo con el sitio escogido por la mamá araña, así que despegué el saco con cuidado y lo acomodé en un frasco con tapa. Una semana más tarde, las ara­ñitas salieron.

El saco (primera foto) se parece al saco de las arañas de la cruz, Araneus diadematus, sus arañitas nuevecitas son de un color amarillo brillante con una mancha negra al extremo posterior. Y no he visto arañas de la cruz en mi recámara este año.

No pude identificar esta familia.

Y luego llevé el frasco afuera, le quité la tapa, y lo guardé en una esquina protegida.

Cellar spiders: life is good!

Now that the weather is a bit cooler, I'm starting to find spiders outside again. Cellar spiders, mainly; here are two, carrying their treasures.

Mother with egg sac.

I haven't seen a male around for a while, but these spiders may mate and then wait until food is available before they lay their eggs. The sac may have up to 60 spiderlings; I think this batch has about 30. They will hatch in a couple or three weeks, and she will carry them until they are ready to move on.

Another sort of treasure: meals for a week.

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Ahora que los dias son un poco más frescos, aun con un poco de lluvia, estoy encontrando más arañas afuera de la casa, en su mayor parte, arañas fólcidas: aquí hay dos, con los tesoros que cargan.

Primera foto: una araña fólcida hembra, con sus huevos. No he visto machos por el rumbo últimamente, pero estas arañas pueden aparear y luego esperar a que haya suficiente comida para poner los huevos. Pueden tener hasta 60 huevos a la vez; esta parece traer más o menos 30. Eclosionarán en unas dos o tres semanas, y la madre cargará con las arañitas hasta que estén listas para enfrentar el mundo a solas.

Segunda foto: otra fólcida, otro tipo de tesoro: las comidas para toda una semana.

New old find

The wind howled. Rain spattered my windows with flying mud. Dawn - a watery, grey sort of dawn - to a greyer dusk gave us barely 8 hours of muted light. No day to take the camera and go looking for kelp. I spent the day re-caulking the new leaks around the bathroom window,  and sorting 10-year-old photos. It seemed a good day to make drastic cuts, leaving the remainder easier to organize and, later on, find.

I found a new candidate for next year's Arachtober; a ten-year-old photo I had filed on the basis of a quick eye-balling under "Land snails".

And yes, I had included it in a blog post back then, but today it was a "new" find. Look:

Grove snail with patterned shell. And a busy mother spider.

And here's a second photo of the spider alone, cleaned up a bit.

Spotty mother, with pinkish egg case.

 

And for today, they're promising us sunny breaks. Interspersed with rain, of course.

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El viento aulló. Gotas gordas de lluvia, llevando lodo levantado por el viento, salpicaron mis ventanas. Desde el amanecer — un amanecer tenue de color gris — hasta una puesta del sol aun más grisaceo, apenas tuvimos 8 horas de media luz. No era un buen dia como para salir con la cámara en busca de kelp. Me pasé el dia calafateando las nuevas grietas alrededor de la ventana del baño, y luego revisando y recortando fotos que tomé hace diez años y más. Parecía un buen día para eliminar muchas, dejando los que quedan más fáciles de organizar y encontrar.

Y en eso, encontré una foto que servirá para empezar mi folder para Arachtober del año que entra, una foto de 2010 que había puesto a base de un rápido vistazo, en el folder de caracoles terrestres.

Si, hay un caracol, pero ¡mira la arañita que lo acompaña! Una araña con su bolsita de huevos. ¡Tan miniatura! El caracol mide apenas 15 a 20 mm.

Y para hoy, nos prometen unos momentos de sol. Entre las lluvias, claro está.

Hidden family and friends

 I went on another spider hunt, to Oyster Bay. I found only one, inside a rotting log, but she's raising a family. With plenty of company.

Mama spider, egg case, and a crew of sow bugs.

"And I'm outta here!"

I carefully replaced her piece of log as I found it.

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Salí otra vez a buscar arañas. Encontré esta, con sus huevos, todos acobijados dentro de un tronco podrido. Acompañándola, una tribu de cochinillas de humedad. Después de sacar las fotos, volví su pedazo de madera al sitio exacto donde la encontré.

Looking backward

And a not-so-elegant spider. This one has a face on her butt!

Not a happy face.

The cream blurry ball on the upper right is the egg case she's guarding.

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Y esta araña no es tan elegante. Tiene una cara en la parte trasera. Y no está de buen humor.

La mancha color crema arriba a la derecha es su capullo con huevos.

Where have all the critters gone?

For some reason, unexplained, this is not a spidery year. Nor has there been the usual insect population, which I would expect when there are fewer spiders to prey on them. I can't remember when I last saw a mosquito. Which is pleasant when you're trying to sleep, but worrisome.

I haven't seen any moths since the ones we followed in the summer. There was a cabbage white butterfly around my flowers last month. Not a flock of cabbage whites, as I would expect.

One singing cricket. Half a dozen crane flies. A few days of green shiny flies. A dozen fruit flies hovering around my old bananas. Beetles? No. Not even ladybugs. I remember seeing one black beetle in the lawn a few weeks ago. It's western conifer seed bug season, when they start moving inside to find a warm spot to spend the winter. There have been none so far this fall.

No wonder there are so few spiders! There's nothing for them to eat.

It's Arachtober. As usual, I collected spider photos for it all year; I needed 45 to post this month. I ran out last week.

I did a thorough inventory of my house, the carport, the flower beds and the lawn. In the house there are cellar spiders, mostly tiny. Their prey seems to be entirely other cellar spiders and one or two little flies.

In the carport: one cross spider, two small unidentifiable spiders, in hiding. In their trash, wood bug remains. And more cellar spiders.

In the flower beds; one cross spider. No jumpers.

I combed spots on the lawn with my fingers, hoping to disturb something small and leggy, as usual. Nothing. Green grass, creeping Charlie, no bugs, no spiders.

No wonder there are so few birds! There's nothing for them to eat.

What is going on?

It's not as if I were in a heavily-polluted area. The street is residential, with large lots backed with bush, in a narrow strip of housing between ocean front and uninhabited forest. There is no heavy industry nearby, nor farms spreading insecticide.

I went to Oyster Bay and explored the usual spidery spots; cottonwood trunks, rolled leaves, old fences, logs on the dunes, the public washrooms. I found a half dozen spider egg cases in over an hour of searching.

I stopped at a disintegrating shack along the shore. Inside (one and a half walls are gone) there were spider webs. No live spiders. No insects.

I turned over boards and pieces of log on the ground around the shack. Wood bugs. A few, but it was good to see something moving.

And I found two spiders. Alive, and busy raising families. Very nice. But; two? When there should have been two hundred?

Something is wrong.

Here are the two spiders:

Spider # 1, on the bottom of a broken piece of log. She has two egg cases, stacked, and full of babies. There's a small slug and three mites for company.

Spider # 2. In the crack between two broken logs. She's guarding her brood, still in the egg sacs.

Her egg sacs. If you look closely, you can see the spiderlings inside, even a few little legs.

I replaced the wood very carefully, not wanting to disturb either the mothers nor their babies. But at best, a dozen or so spiderlings will survive.

 Among a litter of a hundred baby Wolf spiders, usually around one percent survives to adulthood. That’s one out of a hundred. Those are pretty lousy odds if you are a young spider trying to make his/her way in the world. (Quora)

There are still two Arachtober days to go. I have no spider photos left. Unless I use the rubber dollar store spiders I bought, just in case.

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.

Spider search

It was the tail end of Arachtober, and I was running out of spider photos. Oyster Bay seemed a good place to look for a new candidate. I stopped first, to look at the trees in their glorious late fall outfits.

From the meadow, looking back at the parking lot.

Then on to snoop in the corners and crevices.

First find: a cherry-faced meadowhawk. On the parking lot fence.

Under the eaves of the public washroom (centre, top photo); a tightly-wrapped cocoon.

I found one of these cocoons on my doorstep four years ago. I kept it in a container for a month, and a wasp emerged. BugGuide identified it as a parasitoid wasp, but the cocoon would have belonged to the larva of a caterpillar. I couldn't reach this one to capture it; I may go back with some long-handled tool.

Also on the washroom: a house spider with her four egg cases. Too small, too high above my head for an Arachtober photo.

And finally, on the pilings by the shore, a running reddish and black spider. Mission accomplished.

Emergence

The spiderlings have left the nest!

Pioneer. The first out of the nest, at 9:30 in the morning.

One other spiderling joined him this morning, and they wandered about, stringing their tiny silk threads behind them. The others, more timid, waited until well after nightfall to brave the big new world out there.

10 PM. Spreading out, looking for an exit from the box.

They're lining up along the join between walls of the box. I don't think they can get through the gap, but they're trying.

These babies are not behaving like other spiderlings I've watched; usually, they hang together in a cluster for quite some time after they leave the egg sac. These are individualists from the moment they break free.

About half of them are still keeping cosy in their silk blanket. Homebodies.

The eggs in the second egg sac are on their way; I can see a hint of little legs in there now.

Egg sac # 2. Smaller, but fertile.

There's a third egg sac in the line-up, too. Brownie's not leaving anything to chance.

I'll move the box to a sheltered spot outside tomorrow, and crack the door open a bit. I don't really want the whole tribe settling down in my kitchen.

Dozens of little legs

Last month, my spider-in-a-box laid a clutch of eggs and wrapped them in a silk blanket. When she added a second egg sac, I posted photos here.

Steatoda bipunctata, with first batch, November 6th.

And then ...

November 14th. The eggs are a bit darker.

November 25th. Noticeably darker, and spreading out a bit.

This morning, December 14th. They seem to be moving about in there.

And tonight, 5 weeks after egg-laying. Spiderlings! Still inside the silk cocoon.

They'll be moving out of the egg sac soon, but I couldn't wait to post these pre-hatch photos.

Eggs in a blanket

A few weeks ago, searching for spiders for Arachtober, when we post a spider a day to the Flickr pool, I found a pretty, chocolatey cobweb spider under a brick, and brought her inside. I put her in a glass box, and she quickly made herself at home, building a messy web in the corner, and settling in to wait for sowbugs, her favourite food. I'd removed the brick, so I let her stay in the box, and have been providing her with groceries.

Two weeks ago, I found her busy making a blanket for a batch of eggs.

Steatoda bipunctata, with egg case.

If you look closely at the photo, you can see a dense white ball in the centre of the silk fluff she's making. Those are the eggs.

(The other cobweb spiders, the American house spiders, that I've watched making egg cases cover them in a brownish, rumpled, papery skin. It's impossible to see the spiderlings developing until they break out, some weeks later.) "Brownie's" silk blanket is a nice change.

After a week, the eggs were darker, and spreading out a bit.

Egg mass against the window and blue sky.

Brownie is a sleek, glossy spider, with a fat ball of an abdomen. After she laid her eggs, she was really thin, as thin as a male would be. I fed her more sowbugs, and she bulked up again. And this afternoon, when I went to see how the eggs were developing, there she was, weaving a blanket for another batch of eggs!

I left her to it; I'll pester her with a camera once she's resting.

And I'm wondering: she obviously hasn't seen a male since her last batch of eggs, locked in her box as she is. Does she save sperm for a second batch, or will these not be fertile? Will there actually be spiderlings in that second egg case?

Time will tell.

I don't understand

How it can be that a small spider, however well nourished she may be, can lay two bags full of eggs, when each bag is bigger than herself, at her fattest?

"Don't touch my babies!"

I found this proud mother on the backside of a plywood board leaning against the wall in my backyard, and she never so much as twitched a hair while I laid the board flat and fussed around with lamps and the camera. She is guarding her second egg sac; the first is that blur in the bottom left of the photo.

When I'd finished taking photos, I carefully put the board back in the same position. I hope the next tenants ignore her until the babies hatch.

Happy little family

Fat spider ...

And her bag of eggs ...

And her mate, just leaving ...

On the bottom of a stool outside my door.

To spin or not to spin

I will never catch up. Ever.

I've got half a dozen bugs in bottles and boxes on my desk, waiting to be blogged about; my extra hard drive is full of folders labelled, "Blog these"; I've got bookmarks, books, lists of links; the garden is growing, the bees are visiting ...

I need a week, just now and then, with 9 30-hour days in it. Please?

Or I can just get a move on. Starting with a batch of spiders.

1. I flipped a rock today. On the bottom, I found this large web:

Spider web. With average-sized dried maple leaf for comparison.

I didn't want to disturb the spider inside, but I did get a bit of her in one photo; there's a fat, round, brown and black spider body visible just under the centre, and the tip of a couple of legs on the left side.

Funnel-web spider.

2. On the rhododendrons along the walk, the pretty cross spiders are setting up shop. They're still very tiny; barely bright dots where the sun hits them.

Araneus diadematus.

They all, without exception, arrange their round web in front of the vegetation, and sit motionless in the centre, always with their topside facing out, head down.

3. I found this Philodromus dispar in my hallway, captured him, and photographed him in the viewing tin. He (his pedipalp has a thick, blobby end, which identifies him as male) didn't appreciate the attention, but frantically ran around and around, looking to escape, so I quickly let him go, beside the door to the outside, leaving him to make the choice; outside or inside. He chose inside.

I saw him later, roaming in the bathroom. The next day, he was on a lamp in the living room, and later on the wall over my desk. He doesn't make a web. He's a hunter, looking for a mate, probably.

Black and white running crab spider. Always recognizable, because he's lost one of his pedipalps.

4. And this is my Brownie, lurking in her jar:

Steatoda bipunctata

She makes a messy web, with lines going every which way, some sticky, some to be used as paths or signalling threads. She hangs upside-down, after the manner of a house spider, but chooses different spots according to her whim of the moment. Usually, she is under some sort of shelter; a leaf or a clump of frass. Here, she is under the thick stem of a dried leaf.

When a woodbug (her favourite food) falls into the web, she springs into action. But instead of heading directly to the bug, she climbs to the top of a thread, then angles down to reach the bug from overhead. She bites it, then ties it up with silk, using her back legs to manipulate the threads. Once it's tied up, she drags it off, and hides it under another leaf to eat later on.

5. I found this big spider on a garden wall in Tsawwassen:

Large hunter, Tegenaria sp.

Tegenarias are web spiders, but I often see them laying in wait under a bit of shelter, without a web. This one was under the overhang of the top of the wall. A couple of feet away, I found an egg mass, probably hers. You can see the individual eggs under their blanket of webbing. (Photos of egg sacs of other Tegenarias, here and here.)

Spider egg mass.

6. This is a jumping spider that I have never seen before. The usual jumpers I see are those zebra-striped ones. This was a bit bigger, a lot more curious; he kept dancing around, trying to get a good look at the camera.

Phidippus borealis? Tsawwassen.

See those headlight eyes! No fly can sneak by, unobserved! I have seen a jumping spider leap almost 4 inches to catch a fly in mid-air. No web is needed.

Jumper. Side view. Eyes on the top of his head. Handy.

And for a change of scenery, here's a corner of my garden.


I didn't see any spiders on this plant.

.

Post-coital Bliss, sort of

... at least for half of the happy couple.

Part of a continuing series on the life and times of an Achearanea tepidariorum (American house spider) family. Parts I - Spider Watching, II - Fresh laid eggs!, III - Taking Candy from a Baby, IV - We Haz Babies!, and V - Baby Pictures.

Ever since I first saw a timid male hanging around the edge of Fat Momma's web, I have been trying to catch them in the act of mating. No luck yet, but this is as close as I've come.

After the first egg case was laid, the male had disappeared. Whether she ate him or he was off gallivanting, I couldn't tell.

I kept my eye on her, all through the guarding of that egg case, and eventually another male (or the same one) showed up on the wall near her web. He stayed for a few days and disappeared, coincidentally at the same time that she produced another egg case. (And the same day that the first batch hatched.)

In the month since, a third male appeared, hung around a day or two, and was gone. And Fat Momma had a third egg case, the first still hanging there although it was empty.

I have been busy this last week, and didn't monitor her as closely as I could have. I hadn't seen the fourth male, nor was I aware of the hatching of the next round of spiderlings until three days ago; by then, they were probably about 2 days old.

And Fat Momma has a fourth egg case. And the male was still around. She was busy eating him. (Photo above.)

That question answered. She eats her mates.

(I wanted to confirm that it was her latest mate, and not a random visitor of another species, so I waited until she had finished with him, and fished him out of her web. A long wooden back-scratcher was handy for this job. I looked at the tangled, glued-together mess under my little microscope; yes, it was a small Achearanea. Her poor mate, who had sacrificed his all for love.) (And I have a photo, but I'm sure you don't want to see it. It ain't pretty.)

Laurie wonders how that works out; the successful suitor passes on his genes only once. Worse, I think, is that he has provided food for the female after the fact, after the eggs are laid. So he is getting her in shape for the next batch; the eggs fertilized by his successor. Seems counter-productive to me.

Any thoughts on that, anyone?

And I had wondered about incubation periods. So far, I have a sample size of 3; FM's 2, and Chica's 1. The first batch took 25 days, from July 26 to August 19th. The second batch ran from August 19th to Sept. 17th or thereabouts; 28 days, maybe 27. Chica's batch, laid the same day, has not hatched yet; that's 32 days and counting.*

What has changed? The weather. It is definitely colder these nights, cool in the daytime. And FM's web is in a sheltered corner; Chica's is around the outside corner, exposed to the wind.

Are the incubation periods dependent on the temperature? It looks like I'll have to watch right into next summer to find out.

One more thing; Wren had wanted to see baby spiders, and I couldn't get a decent photo. A few days later, one showed up on my doorpost, so tiny that I don't know how it was that I noticed it, just a black dust speck that caught the light and seemed to have legs. I was in a rush, and only stopped to take one photo. When I came back later, though I searched with a lens up and down the door, I couldn't find any spiderlings at all.

So here is a fuzzy baby pic.



Now to see if I can catch another baby of this latest batch.

*Update; Saturday morning. Chica's eggs are hatching. That's 33 days.

Baby pictures

When the house spider's eggs hatched, 5 days ago, (We Haz Babies!) Wren wrote in the comments that she had only seen masses of spiderlings, never single ones. I have been watching ever since, hoping to catch one on its own.

Difficult. For the first 4 days, they huddled together around the egg case, so tightly that it was hard to see them with the naked eye as more than a grainy mass.

I tried to get photos, but they were just too tiny and too inaccessible, up in the dark corner, far above my reach, even from the stepladder, for clear shots.

Day two. Moving around a bit.

Day three. With artificial light.

Over the last two days, the crowd has been thinning and spreading out; their numbers were dropping. I kept looking for strays, but any that left the group just plain disappeared.

Last night, with only a couple of dozen babies left, I went out after dark with a flashlight and examined the web. Ah-hah! Tiny moving dots showed up along some of the strands. It took some doing, but I caught two.

Day five. Momma and the last of the brood.

Those guys are tiny! Inside, under the light, I could barely see them with the naked eye; they could have been dust motes, for all I could tell. Only with my hand microscope (60x) could I see them with any clarity.

So; no photos of single spiderlings. Sorry, Wren.

At that age and size, their abdomen is a pale yellowish tan, the thorax reddish. But they have their mother's fat belly, the darker joints on the legs, and the beginning of a pattern, tiny black dots on the upper abdomen. And under the microscope, I can see their eyes clearly, something I have never managed with the mother; she always seems to have them shielded behind the legs.

When I had done examining them, I realized that I could have gotten others all over me, prowling around the web; they are so small, I would never have noticed. Suddenly, I could feel them crawling down my neck and up my arms. Nothing but my imagination, but still, I had to shower and change clothes and wipe down the desk with alcohol before I could settle down again.

But what an adventure their life is! So tiny, and walking all that long, long way out of the mother's web, out into the world where danger lurks at every corner. The trees across the lawn are festooned with the webs of Araneus diadematus, several orders of magnitude larger than they and more than happy to snack on a mouthful of baby Achearanea. They will have far to go before they find safe places to set up shop.