Last month sometime I had a visit from a daring jumping spider.
Now the little gal is back again.
It has been getting really cold here and I think the spider wanted to escape the winter and come back inside. Here she is on the balcony window again.
It was easy to catch her because she was cold. I put her into one of my extra insect enclosures that I usually use for crickets. I placed a waxworm in the cage she sprang into action and caught it immediately.
Then she dragged it into the cardboard egg carton I have in the cage to finish it off slowly.
These jumping spiders usually only live for a year because the winter ends up killing them. They can live much longer than a year though if kept in captivity. I'll keep her over the winter and hopefully she will survive until spring when I can release her back into the wild. In the meantime she will be well fed and I'll try and get more macro photos.
I'm hoping this year's jumping spider will lay eggs and I'll be able to have some really tiny little spiderlings to take portraits of. I found this little one in spring barely even larger than a pencil lead. If spiderlings do hatch I'll need to setup a fruit fly cage to give them something small enough to eat.
Over the years various different spiders have wandered into my place trying to keep warm from the winter. I usually try and put them in an enclosure to see if they will live long enough until spring. Here is a grass spider that lasted over a winter.
They may look scary but their fangs aren't really strong enough to the pierce the skin and they rarely bite. They mostly try and run away, this one got used to me handling it for photoshoots.
I was able to get some pretty close macros.
In the meantime hopefully my other pet spiders won't get too jealous of the new spider.
