Green Lynx Spider (Peucetia) 110108

The photo on the right shows the remnants of the egg case of page 3, whose eggs have now hatched. Hatchlings inside the coarse webbing remnant remain until their first molt. After molting once in the egg sac, they will emerge to begin fending for themselves. As Debbie watched the hatchlings develop she also noticed that clumps of matter began to collect at random in the webbing. Some of this material was no doubt the cast skins of the molting hatchlings, but it is also normal for corpses of dead hatchlings to collect in such a web. Most spiders, lynx spiders among them, are fierce competitors and that trait is present even in the nymphal stage. It is natural for a certain amount of cannibalism to occur in the nursery. In fact, nursery cannibalism may play an important role in natural selection inasmuch as nymphs more likely to survive on their own are also more likely to cannibalize their siblings and vice versa. Once the molted spiderlings emerge from the nursery, they disperse by ballooning; they play out a line of silk which, when caught by a breeze, lifts them up into the air for a flight to a new locale. Ballooning is a very common, efficient, and economical means of dispersion for entelegyne spiders ----FINIS---- PAGE MENU:   1  *  2  *  3  *  4  *  

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