Dome Spider

Araneidae; Cyrtophora; Cyrtophora cicatrosa Stoliczka, 1869. I must start by apologising for the quality of the pictures, the reason for this will hopefully become clear if you read on. In our front yard, there are two small Palms (Cycas revoluta). This species of palm usually grows to a height of about 5 metres, but this variety here in Philippines grows to a height of only 1 metre with a leaf spread of around 1.5 metres. In January, 2020 I could not help but notice that both little palms had become enshrouded in some rather strange looking spider web. This rather spoiled the beauty of the palms because wind blown leaves from other plants and some other detritus had been accumulating by sticking to the webs. So I decided to investigate. I was expecting to see (on each palm) a spider of sufficient size to build such huge webs. So I searched for some time without success. The density and complexity of the weaving made it difficult to see if there was a spider inside. I should explain that this appeared to be a three dimensional mass of spider silk, nothing even remotely resembling an orb web. Eventually, I got lucky and spotted a tiny spider deep inside. then another and another until I counted five. They were all inside this "complex web" on just one of the two palms (I never got around to inspecting the second palm). My immediate thought was that these minuscule spiders were going to be eaten by some monster which had created this web, but since I could not see a big spider I decided to try and gain some information from the internet. So I took these pictures of the small spiders. It was not easy, as they were deep inside and I was taking photos through layers of spider silk. I am sure you all know that by selecting the correct lens aperture and focusing with what a photographer would call a narrow depth of field, you can to some extent "blur out" the foreground objects (in this case strands of silk) and get an image of the object you want (the spider). So, I ended up with the photos you see here. I only know that these are females because of the presence of strings of egg sacks. I read in Wiki that this mass of spider silk is not a single web, but a colony of webs, each belonging to one spider and all of them connected. It is explained that this is one of only a few spider species to display social behaviour.