Yesterday was a so-so day at work - more admin headaches than investigative fun - so I took off at 3pm, and went to Queenstown Secondary School - 500 meters from our flat for a bit of spider action. Wow was it fun. The same Nephila pilipes was busy waiting for prey - while 3 male Nephila were fighting among themselves and thinking about mating. The fun part was with the Argyrodes flavescens - both male and female and there was a bit of mating action going on there also. Difficult to capture with still images - but got a few photos of the fighting. Then Miagrammopes wiggled as I was leaving and identified her location. So got some excellent shots of her rebuilding her single strand web (after I disconnected one end). Her behavior is quite predictable and my experiments are getting more and more consistent. Captions later
This lynx climbed onto my little yellow towel laying on the grass. Maybe next time I'll try this again as this is the first time I've found one of these guys.
I moved and she moved
Then she moved again. Being only 5 - 10 cm above the grass, impossible to get a head-on view. But I shall take my yellow towel and see if this works again. The rain was less so I moved to the Nephila spot
It was raining slightly - here is our lady with a small rain drop on her left palp
Later - an edge view shooting across her web - the male on one side and the female on the other side.
Up close and personal
Here is one of the males behind the female
A male Nephila pilipes
Here is a photo of a male with the embolic conductors clearly visible projecting from the top (in this photo) of each palp.
Two male Nephila pilipes tend to fight for access to the female. I had not seen this before and could not get enough depth of field to accurately capture the action. Here the top one is in the focal plane.
Sort of a brushoff. What happened was that one male approached the other, then flexed his legs to successively elevate and lower his abdomen - probably some sort of signal that something is going to happen. Then there is a touch and then a brief encounter (of the 2nd kind) and one makes a hasty retreat
The main event Argyrodes flavescens
In this Nephila web, there are at least 1 male and 2 female Argyrodes flavescens. There is a mating game in progress. One appears to play where one (I think the female) wraps her legs around herself and appears as a small dinner (see below photo) fragment caught by the host Nephila pilipes
A male Argyrodes flavescens approaches with one palp extended
On the move and extruding silk
Male approaching
Mating action (?)
which continues for maybe half a minute
And on it goes
This guy looks like he is just swinging by 2 strands
Extruding tiny silk
Good view of her eyes
Spanning Nephila silk and his (or maybe her) silk
WIth palps extended - ready for action
Extruding silk
The male doing something - with his palps in the retracted position
Extruding silk and climbing her own strand
Female climbing
Female extruding
Female doing something
Male with palps extended. A matrix of Nephila and Argyrodes silk
Miagrammopes
Walking back home, I passed a group of leaves and something wiggled. I knew immediately that probably it was a stick spider, Miagrammopes. Here she is in her stick configuration.
I had some success early with initiating some web management behaior. After waiting for perhaps 10 min and nothing, I detached the far end (right) of her single strand. Look carefly to the left of her 1st legs and you'll see the tangle ball of silk, the excess accumulated by making the strand tight.
Immediately she dropped to a vertical position with the loose end of silk flying through the breeze
As the loose end floated about, it temporarily attached to something to the right and she started withdrawing excess silk. You can see the tangle ball of silk held by her 2nd legs and the bind in her first legs
The strand detached itself and reattached to something on the left of the image. Here she is agressively tensioning the strand
The progress in tensioning can be measured by the piece of debris to the left of her leg (compare with the above photo)
More tensioning
Here the piece of debris is adjacent to her 1st leg
As the tension increases - her orientation changes. Here she is in a more curved configuration
With the strand almost completely tensioned, you can see a strand between her 1st legs and 2nd legs
C. Frank Starmer