Cellar spider

[MarkSturtevant]

Cellar spider with eggs. Pholcus manueli. According to BugGuide, our native cellar spiders are now far less common, having been displaced by 3 introduced species of cellar spiders. This is one of the 3.
Female cellar spiders hold their egg sacs in their jaws, and as you see there isn't much silk around the sac and the egg shells are quite thin so you can see the developing embryos quite clearly. When the babies emerge, they briefly stay in a leggy spherical mass around the females head, and it is quite a sight to see. But I have not been lucky enough to get acceptable pictures of that.
I spent a long time with this one, making several focus stacked pictures of her in a staged setting. It was fun playing around with different light arrangements to get different effects.
Cellar spider by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
Cellar spider by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
Cellar spider by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

Thanks for looking!
Cellar spider by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

[Guppy]

Hi Mark

Thank you for these beautiful and informative pictures, I like them very much.
Especially the last picture makes me wonder,
Eyes of the spider and eggs very nice in focus.
Very nice pictures, they bring me joy!

Kurt

[Peter Maihoefer]

I like the pictures and the text helps well to expand knowledge.

The focus in picture 3 and 4 is exactly in the right place.

Thank you very much.

Peter

[leonardturner]

A technical tour de force! Nice work!

Leonard