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Something you don't see everyday... a writing spider egg nest.
Sorry for the crappy photo - very quick point-and-shoot grab, and the shadowed area caused a blur. But it's better than nothing considering the odds of seeing her wrap her arms around it like that again.
Although not a true spider, Solifugae belong to the order Arachnida. Scorpions and harvestmen also belong to this order. These are called Camel Spiders or Wind Scorpions, amongst other things....
Well, today I went out to do the daily check on the Writing Spider and her egg sack. The eggs are still there (unhatched). The Spider was up in her usual place near the security light, about 2 feet above face level.
I neared her with the camera, and noticed she was a lot thinner - thinner than even after she laid her eggs. Then, slowly, she started to lower herself down - literally right in front of me, like 3 feet from my face. Very slowly she "pulled" webbing out of her backside, and lowered down. Never afraid of me or making any kind of defensive "arms up" posture or anything. But almost as if in slow motion.
It was later in the day and she was in shade, so I had to user higher iso speeds and use the camera's flash set very low to fill her in.
Over the course of 10 minutes, she made her way down to the deck floor (unusual), and slowly crawled over the edge of the deck toward the ground. At this point she was low enough where my dogs could get to her, so I got a paddle thing I have with a long rod on it, and put it in front of her, fully expecting her to panic and scamper away, or up the thing super fast and cause me to scream like a girl. But, she didn't. She slowly and with visible effort, pulled herself up on the paddle and sat there. I placed her in some tall grass on the other side of the fence, and she just went down into it to the ground. I checked a few hours later and she remains there, and I'm pretty sure she died.
Funny - after spending a couple of months watching her and taking pics of her, she was almost a "pet" and I got sad that a Spider died! I was hoping she'd last long enough to see her eggs hatch and be around for some pics of her and her offspring. argh.
That's kind of sad that your spider died. I think it's nice that you moved her into the grass.
This following photo is very poor quality but I thought I would post it because of the dynamics going down. It's a mother wolf spider with newly hatched white babies on her back and she still has the egg sack attached with other babies emerging. There's another smaller wolf spider there, I don't know if mom is defending babies from it or if it's a juvenile from an earlier hatch in attendance on her, or if it's a smaller adult male. The smaller spider appeared beside her when I disturbed the mother while trying to get pictures of her and the babies.
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