Ladybird Spider

Fascinating facts about the Ladybird Spider

• The male ladybird spider spends most of his life hidden underground, and only in his final spring does he transform: a jet-black body with a scarlet abdomen marked by four to six black spots, so like a ladybird that the resemblance gave the species its name. He then abandons his burrow entirely and walks the heath by day in search of a female, a journey he will not survive for long.
• Females never leave. She lives her entire life — up to four years — inside a silk-lined tube spun down into sandy soil, velvet-black and twice the male's size, ambushing beetles that blunder across the silk tripwires radiating from her entrance.
• The species vanished from Britain entirely, or so everyone believed, until a single colony of fewer than sixty spiders was rediscovered in Dorset in 1980. A decades-long rescue programme has since carried them, one hand-carried pot at a time, back onto protected heathland.
• Ladybird spiders need bare, sun-warmed sand next to old heather — a combination created by grazing, fire and disturbance. Tidy, overgrown heathland is fatal to them, which is why their fate is tied so tightly to how we manage these landscapes.
• The mother's last act is to be eaten. She guards her egg sac through summer, and when the spiderlings hatch she feeds them a fluid from her own body, then allows them to consume her — a final meal that carries them through their first winter underground.

At a glance

About the Ladybird Spider

For most of the year the ladybird spider is invisible. Both sexes live in silk-lined burrows sunk into warm, bare sand at the edge of old heather, and the female will never willingly leave hers — she can spend four years in a tube barely longer than a finger, black and velvet-furred, waiting for a beetle to touch one of the silk threads fanning out from her door. The male lives the opposite life, and only briefly. After years hidden underground he moults into something extraordinary: a scarlet abdomen spotted with black, white-banded legs, a body so like a ladybird that Victorian naturalists named him for it. Then he walks. Through May and June he crosses open heath in daylight, exposed to every bird and wasp on the hill, searching for the burrow of a female he cannot see. Most fail. Those that succeed mate underground and die there. What follows is one of the strangest acts of care in the animal world: the female guards her egg sac through the summer, feeds the emerging spiderlings a nutritious fluid from her own body, and then lets them eat her. Her body sustains them through their first winter. Once thought extinct in Britain, the species was rediscovered in 1980 as a single colony of fewer than sixty individuals in Dorset, and has been painstakingly hand-carried back onto protected heathland ever since. Their survival depends on something counter-intuitive: heath that is grazed, burned and disturbed enough to keep bare sand open to the sun.

Ladybird Spider photographed on Feravox

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