Out with the Old
One of the spiders in my garden molted last night.
This is the same spider I've showed you pictures of before. You can see above her is a mere shadow of her former exoskeleton. She will probably eat it and use it to make more silk.
You might also have noticed that her stabilimentum has morphed from a nice, clean zig-zag to a tangled mess. You can't see it very well in this picture, but her web is also really messy. My uneducated theory is that it is because she was so cramped in her old exoskeleton that she just didn't have the agility to make a really nice, clean web.
The other spider in my garden molted the other day, and since then her web has become much nicer than it was.
Speaking of the other spider, to your left is a picture of her! In addition to cleaning up her web, she has repositionited it a bit so that I can get better pictures of her. How thoughtful!
Here you can see she is eating some sort of bug. It is too digested for me to identify her prey. You can see that the stabilimentum in her web is much nicer than her sister's. If you click on the picture it's got some good detail of the markings on her back and the little hairs on her legs.
