Hi – Sorry I don’t have a picture to send, but this all happened far too fast for me to grab a camera. I was setting in a chair on one side of the room very early in the morning, when I noticed something moving near the front door. When I got up to check it out, it turned out to be a spider like I have never seen before. It was a light brown color,with a darker brown abdomen, and almost looked like it had hair growing on it’s abdomen. And it was quite large, about the size of a quarter. The strangest thing about this spider was, when I opened the door to shoo it out, hundreds of baby spiders jumped off of the abdomen and scurried in all directions. They were too small for me to get a good look at and moving far to fast. I was living in So CA at the time, and I have spent at least five or six years trying to find out what this spider was. Can you help out?
Thanks in advance,
Linda
Hi Linda,
Female Wolf Spiders, Family Lycosidae, carry their eggs around. When the eggs hatch, the young spiders, called spiderlings, ride around on their mother’s back for a short time. These are hunting spiders which do not build webs. The females are highly maternal. You obviously caught them the minute the apron strings were cut. Congratulations on seeing a wonder of nature that obviously left an impression. Here is an image I downloaded from a Florida website. Wolf Spiders of different species are found worldwide.
