Rewilding My Lot

I regularly check my Texas Mountain Laurel tree for Genista Broom Moth caterpillars, which can eat a lot of tender new foliage if they get out of control. On this particular morning I did see a couple of caterpillars, which were plucked off and flung away.

The Texas Mountain Laurel tree is a common resting place for insects and other creatures. I’ve seen solitary bees, crickets, lady beetles, and a lot of other things that I don’t recognize yet.

On this occasion, what caught my eye was a green spider with black spines on its legs, guarding an egg sac.

I believe this to be a Green Lynx Spider (Peucetia viridans), which I have seen before in the garden, but never with an egg sac.

These spiders hunt their prey by pouncing on them — they don’t use webs. So the fact that there is some webbing in this location suggests to me that it might be attachment or support for the egg sac in some way.

Here’s what the Wikipedia page has to say about Green Lynx Spider eggs:

“The female constructs one to five 2-centimeter (0.8 in) egg sacs in September and October, each containing 25 to 600 bright orange eggs, which she guards, usually hanging upside down from a sac and attacking everything that comes near. Remarkably, one of her means of defense is to squirt (spit) venom from her chelicerae, sometimes for a distance of about a foot (300 mm). The eggs hatch after about two weeks, and after another two weeks fully functional spiderlings emerge from the sac. They pass through eight instars to reach maturity.”

This egg sac is in an easy location for me to monitor. I will definitely be adding this to my daily patrols!