Paint and Pixels

Itsy Bitsy Spiders

About a month ago, the kids and I discovered a wolf spider hiding in the rocks in our front yard. She was about an inch and a half long and was carrying an egg sack attatched to her abdomen. At first we thought that she looked scary, but then we put our prejudices behind us and welcomed her into our home. It's a good thing that we did that, because we discovered that she had a fun loving, yet sometimes shy personality. Knowing that she had babies on the way, we tried to feed her well. Usually we would find flies buzzing around in our windows and catch them by spraying them with hair spray and then killing them. Charlotte (that's what we named her) seemed to enjoy the flies and never complained about the taste of hairspray. Sometimes we would feed her other spiders too, but she was not as eager to eat these. After a couple of weeks, we started to grow impatient with the anticipation of babies spiders and began to think that maybe they were never coming. I researched wolf spiders on the internet and discovered that sometimes they will wrap pepples or shells up in an eggsack and carry it around as if it is babies, but really it is not. I began to wonder if Charlotte had done that and faked the whole pregnancy just for the attention. I decided to wait a little longer before giving up on her. Sure enough, sometime on Sunday night, Charlotte had her babies- around 200 of them. They crawled out of the egg sack and now she carries them all around on her back. They completely cover her entire body except her eyes and mouth and legs. She is a devoted mother to her babies. I will probably release her back into the wild soon, because I'm not going to start a spider ranch. On second thought, maybe that could be a good business venture. Anyone interested in a good natured baby wolf spider?

This is a picture of Charlotte carrying around her hundreds of babies-click on the picture to look closer (they are tiny)!