Spiderlet

The most curious of all are the ground spiders like the Lycosae which drag the egg sac around attached to the posterior end of the abdomen, or in some cases held by the chelicerae. When these latter hatch the young spiderlets climb on to the mother and let her carry them about.

The giant orb-weaving spider Nephila clavipes stands guard over her eggs, which are fastened to a leaf. Until the spiderlets hatch, she lets her 8-foot web go untended.

On being questioned by the others as to what might be the nature of these webs, I explained to the others that an oft-repeated statement in natural history books is that very young spiders on hatching will frequently pay out long strands of silk from their spinnerets until the wind catches them and they eventually become airborne, sometimes being transported many miles and even, as I seemed to recall, far out to sea on occasion. […] Spiders can and do at times produce vast lengths (in proportion to their size) of web material at little expense to their own metabolism, and I visualized the little spiderlets, wherever they might be, continuing to emit their silken trails during their airborne journey as the wind broke and blew the first ones away.

When little spiders, or spiderlets, hatch, they look like full-grown spiders except that they are smaller and are very pale.

Hushabye, darlings, mama’ll get dinner / So sweet little fledglings won’t get any thinner. Rockabye, rocklings, roc, roc, roc a bye. Spiders bring squiggly worms, small as your eyelash. Salmon catch minnows, quick as a fly flash. Hairy red spiders give spiderlets lice. Cats bring their kittens home little grey mice.

I soak off their labels, wash them till they gleam and glitter, dry them upside down in a rack, plug their mouths with tissue against dust and web-weaving spiderlets, and then sort them according to hue and shape—burgundy, claret, rhine, or italianate oddball—before stowing them away in compartmented cartons liberated from a liquor store’s garbage.

Ships many miles at sea find tiny spiders dropping in on them from the passing breeze. Somewhere on the far-off shore the little aeronauts, a few weeks out of the egg sac, seem to answer an inborn urge to emigrate to a new territory. […] Some of the spiderlets may travel only a few inches if the wind quits. But others could conceivably cross oceans.

Young spiders, though, do take to the air; indeed they were the first exponents of hang-gliding. On a day when the breeze is gentle the spiderlets climb to the top of a grass stem and spin their own hang glider from a silken thread.