Agelenopsis sp. Grass Spider suddenly very active

LordAnon

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Jun 30, 2018
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I have a wild caught Pennsylvania Grass Spider that I've had in a small critter keeper for a couple months now. It's molted once while I've had it, but if it was the mature molt then it's not a male (no bulbs on palps). Recently, she's made a change in her behavior. Suddenly she's very skittish in her enclosure. While she used to stay in her funnel, hidden somewhere in the upper corner of her enclosure, recently she's started crawling around her web, even spazzing out at times and bolting off of it.

So far my theories are:

1) The web is too dirty. I don't make a habit of cleaning it because I don't know if I should, and there are roach legs and such everywhere. I'm thinking of rehousing her, destroying the web, and putting her back to make a new web.

2) She wants to leave for some reason. I know this just sounds like "I don't know" but I'm thinking she's cramped. Even though she doesn't usually leave her funnel, maybe she wants more room to expand the web (I've seen some large grass spider webs).

I'm fairly certain it's not hunger. She's my best eater and looks fat enough to be gravid (even though at this point I know it's probably not gonna happen). Ideas? Anyone have experience with these spiders?
 

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The Snark

Dumpster Fire of the Gods
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Too many variables to give a useful answer. A mature female wishing to breed to temperature to humidity to space requirements to reactions from food consumed to environment issues to light/dark levels to a desire for privacy on out to the unknown reasons why spiders sometimes abandon their webs and make new ones.
Observe, make hypothesis, analyze, test, re-evaluate.
 

LordAnon

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Too many variables to give a useful answer. A mature female wishing to breed to temperature to humidity to space requirements to reactions from food consumed to environment issues to light/dark levels to a desire for privacy on out to the unknown reasons why spiders sometimes abandon their webs and make new ones.
Observe, make hypothesis, analyze, test, re-evaluate.
Yeah, I can see how it wouldn't be very easy to give any one answer. I'll definitely be watching. I'm going to clean out the enclosure and see how she reacts after building a new web. I have hypothesized that, as you said, she probably wants to move on and build a web elsewhere. I find their abandoned nests all the time, so I can't imagine they usually stick around for very long. I'll post the results once I see a change, if any change happens at all.
 

LordAnon

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Update

So since then I've moved her into a larger enclosure. I have a single live plant in the center, and she immediately webed all around it. She's not as twitchy anymotr,but she's still an angry spider. I've never seen a true spider threat posture before lol.
 

WildSpider

Arachnobaron
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Jul 14, 2018
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I've never seen a true spider threat posture before lol.
I was reading before about Araneus diadematus doing what the writer though was threat postures. When you walk right up to it and say "Hi!" in a very deep voice or in a high voice, the legs will go up. I've seen this myself many times in similar circumstances. I have my own opinion on what the purpose could be but the writer could be right that it's doing threat postures. What I think is that it feels the vibrations and is getting ready to catch its food like a ball if it comes close enough. The reason I think this is I've seen many of mine do this when a fly is in close proximity and they can catch it that way.

I've never seen any of my Agelenopsis sp. do threat postures before or anything that looks like threat postures so this is pretty interesting. I have seen a video before of a wild Agelenopsis sp. rushing at the guy holding the camera. Perhaps yours and the one in the video are displaying a bit of a "temper" for similar reasons.
 

LordAnon

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What I think is that it feels the vibrations and is getting ready to catch its food like a ball if it comes close enough. The reason I think this is I've seen many of mine do this when a fly is in close proximity and they can catch it that way.
At the very least, she was behaving very differently than when she hunts. I was trying to destroy some web closer to the lid of the enclosure, where she sleeps, poking it through an airhole. I've done this before in her old enclosure, but now she's having none of it. She reared up her front legs and palps, and after a second prodding she bit the tongs. I'm going to try to get it on camera. I prefer this behavior over her tendency to warp around her enclusure at the slightest breeze.
 
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