Photo Essays

Spiders, Snails and other wildlife near Cazedarnes, France

This, I believe, is an egg sac from Pisaura mirabilis or Agelenidae labyrinthica (but I am uncertain about this identification) that has opened and a multitude of baby spiders exited. Their collective behavior is interesting. In the morning, the baby spiders congegrate into a small cluster. When you disturb the web, the baby spiders run away from the cluster - but after a few minutes, they recongegrate and reform the cluster. I never observed clustering after midday. I assume that this means that the cluster behavior is a way to concerve heat. Later during the day, there is more heat, and clustering is not necessary.

Left - the egg sac (white blob) and the cluster of baby spiders.

Right - after disturbing the web the baby spiders abandon their cluster.

Here are photos taken at different times, demonstrating that the dispersal pattern of the baby spiders changes with time. When left undisturbed, the babies are not very active.

This seems to be mom - (sort of like Agelena labyrinthica or Pisaura mirabilis) watching carefully

This spider builds a funnel and hides inside

I found several webs and tried to photograph each one. She is only about 3-4 mm long.

Here she has caught a small something - probably a fly

Here is have tripped over one of the support for her web and the result is a quarter web.

Rachel and I went for a long walk around Cazedarnes. We saw many interesting insects.

Here are two colorful insects that either have an interesting way of communicating or are mating. There are beautiful butterflies everywhere - and here, some sort of irredescent green insect doing whatever they do on the top of this purple flower. Each morning, there was a heavy dew and snails were everywhere, harvesting the water, I suppose. Here is a sample of the morning dew.

And here is a sample of the morning snails

A lizard

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning