Social Spiders

Good um...Morning.y up, it is still morning. There was just a fire drill. Let me tell you, it scared me so bad. Anyway. Back to blogging now.

(From here to the rest of the post you should listen to this: https://youtu.be/ziQ9GURNrUg )

So recently (yesterday) I have realized that my brain is bored. It yearns for knowledge. My eyes yearn to read. A book. Because believe it or not, we don' t really read books in school. When I was home schooled was LOT of heavy book reading. It appears that I am having withdrawals. To Solve this I did something insane, I picked up a book. It mom's book on how to take portraits. It was nice to read. Anyway, I think that we should learn something today. Let's see.

So there is this social spider called the Anelosimus eximius which lives in colonies southern America. I saw a picture of one of their nests on Twitter. It was incredible. These things work together to build a HUGE web and live together. They share their prey for the most part and generally live for an average of 71 days. The females are larger than the males and (like most spiders) put more effort into raising the young spider-lings; taking care of their needs until the third instar. I think an instar is like when the spider sheds its exoskeleton and then grows. Females have six instars while males only have five, both sexes reach maturity at the third instar. I just read an interesting article that says that larger colonies are dying off because they do not have enough to eat. Once the colony reaches a certain size, they can catch less prey of larger size and somehow this makes sharing with the whole colony more difficult I guess. It was very interesting. Here, I will post a link.

https://www.popsci.com/biggest-spider-colonies-in-world-are-leading-to-their-own-demise

And now I shall find some photos.