Fear: Wolf Spider Carries Puppies on Back to Know the World
Spiders are not very cute animals. Some may enter your body uninvited, others are extremely poisonous or are capable of eating whole birds. But one thing no one can say is that they are bad mothers.
In the video below, you can see the moment when a wolf spider took its youngs for a walk. Bobby Brown, a former student at the University of Northwest Missouri State, filmed the creature that had a tiny spiders-abdomen. According to the boy, she measured about 10 cm when her legs were stretched.
Notice that the spider walks towards the cameraman, but he gradually moves away from her. However, as he zooms in, he can see the body of the pup-infested arachnid - probably the scene is also etched into the boys' minds, as they look very frightened.
“Look at the cubs on her back!” Shouts the man and zooms in to show the spider's hairy abdomen and its offspring. "Stretched, she was about four inches and her body was about the same size as a Gatorade cap, with all the bugs in it, " explains the boy.
The "bug" was just looking for a safe place to raise the puppies, but was eventually chased away by the two men. Brown reports that he did not kill the animal, only put it out: “I caught her and took her out of the house. Just yesterday I caught a mouse spider and did the same ”- apparently the spiders like the boy.
Quite a mother
Wolf spiders are members of the Lycosidae family and have excellent hunting and viewing ability. Some attack prey directly, while others prefer to hide and wait for the right moment.
Stuart Hine, an expert at the London Natural History Museum, reports that “the female in this family of arachnids usually carry eggs with her wherever she goes and when they hatch, the pups climb their mother's abdomen where they can seek shelter. and protection - including some of the food purchased by the spider. ”
Wolf spiders are unique in the way they carry their young. They stick a web egg to the spinnerets that are located at the end of their abdomen to carry their unborn chicks with them.
Despite their scary looks, they are great mothers. As soon as spiders hatch from the egg, the female allows them to climb her legs and take shelter in her abdomen. In this way, little creatures are perfectly camouflaged against predators and are more likely to survive into adulthood.
My children first
Since it was posted last week, the video of spider mom and her young has been viewed more than 1 million times. Recently, after the start of the “spider season” in California, USA, a man recorded some pets that he had caught in a pot.
In the video, a small female spider is attacked by a larger male. She was full of puppies, which were released after her mother's death. Some experts argue that the spider apparently chose to give the young the best chance of survival as it was being threatened by a larger specimen.
However, it seems that it was the puppies who made the “decision, ” not her. Dr. Judith Lock, a specialist in behavioral ecology at Southampton University, says it looks like little spiders jumped off her mother's back when she was being threatened - which denatured children, right?
Few spider species allow pups to piggyback on their backs while they are small. This increases the chances that they will not be devoured. “The abuser became his mother. Maybe the little spiders recognized the chance and that's when they jumped out, ”Dr. Lock explains.
One invertebrate expert at the Bristol Zoo in England argues: “In this case, the dispersal of puppies was the mother's best survival method - not because it distracted or attacked the male, but gave it a chance. of them escaping. Maternal care is amazing in the spider world. ”