Ervaringen met mijn "toevallige" Nephila-kweek

This article describes the author's experiences after unexpectedly receiving two pregnant female specimens from a friend who had just arrived from Indonesia in 2008. A few days earlier, he had rescued these specimens from a group of fishermen near Sukolilo, Surabaya, who had planned to use the spiders' abdomens as bait for fishing. The females were put in a specially built terrarium, and started to produce offspring. The life cycle of the next generations of spiders has been under observation since then. Both imported specimens had yellow dorsal abdomens, but their female descendants vary considerably in colour. Perhaps N. antipodiana is the Nephila species with the highest amount of colour variation in this respect. If true, this might be an evolutionary advantage because this species is able to adapt in this manner to different environments. Males do not seem to differ in colour, but differ considerably in size (recorded total leg span variation 5-60 mm), whereas in females a great amount of size variation has not been observed (recorded total leg span variation 126-165 mm). This must mean that the number of moults before varies much more in males than in females. These results may have been influenced by living in captivity, under natural circumstances the degree of variation locally may be lower.