Ladybird Spider

Fascinating facts about the Ladybird Spider

• Male ladybird spiders are barely half an inch long, measuring just 6 to 9 mm, while females grow to 10-16 mm. Their bright orange backs sport four large and two tiny black spots, a pattern that never includes white hairs and whose legs lack red hairs.
• A mother ladybird spider sacrifices herself for her brood: after the 35-80 eggs hatch, she feeds the spiderlings with a liquid from her mouth, then appears to digest her own body, dying within days. The newbornlings then suck on the still-alive mother, gaining vital nutrients before leaving the nest the following spring.
• British ladybird spider numbers jumped from an estimated 50 individuals in 1993 to over 600 counted in 2000, a surge credited to English Nature's Species Recovery Programme and related actions. The species is now protected under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act and is the focus of the Back from the Brink project, which moves spiders to new sites to build fresh populations.
• Ladybird spiders are native to Europe, occupying northern and central regions. near-threatened in France, highly endangered in Germany, and vulnerable in Sweden.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

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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