Oval St. Andrew's Cross Spider

Description:

This is one of the spiders that I rescued from a rice field, just prior to the crop being harvested. In https://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/26...... I described how this Argiope aemula created an egg sac during her first night in captivity. Then, six days later, as descrined in https://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/20...... she produced another egg sac. This gave me a rough approximation of when yet another egg sac might be created, and with this advance knowledge of the likely date and time, I thought I could perhaps take pictures of the complete process. So, at 3:30 a.m. this morning I went out to the cage and quickly set up my camera. When I opened the lid of the cage, to allow me to photograph what was happening inside, I saw that I was too late. The egg sac was almost complete and I just got some shots of the spider making some finishing touches - some more layers of silk over the completely recognizable sac and additional mooring lines to secure it in position. So, I had made a good decision to start my "night vigil" one day early (five days after the previous egg sac, instead of six - it was meant to be "dry run"), but I made a complete hash of the actual timing. I should have realized that laying hundreds of eggs and encapsulating them in a thick, strong sac takes much more time than I thought. I should have started before midnight and stayed the course until morning. That might have given me a better chance of success. That is exactly what I intend to do, five days from now, in the hope of yet another egg sac being produced.

Habitat:

This is one of the spiders which I rescued from a rice field just before harvesting time. So, its original habitat was the rice field, but it is now in a temporary habitat, a cage in our terrace.