A Broken Down Mule and Spider Sex

This evening started off like any other evening with me getting ready to head to Bat Cave to take a census. I used the mule (no, not the animal) to drive to the park office to check my mail first. I had three things! A postcard from Meredith in Africa, a letter from home, and my glassworks project from Canberra! What a great way to start my evening. I then drove down to Bat Cave to set up. The cave entrance is a hole in the ground about 25 feet by 25 feet. There’s a fence around it so people/animals don’t accidentally fall in. So far I’ve been inside once and the mounds of guano are quite impressive, although not quite as smelly as I though they’d be. The emergence tonight went well and seemed heavy. The past few counts have been between 25,000 and 29,000 bats. The resident owl came through a few times and swooped down into the cave to catch dinner. The resident possums (a mom with her baby clinging to her back) came out of the cave once it got dark. They use the ladder that goes into the cave to climb out every evening. After an hour and a half of recording I closed up shop at 7:45pm and went to the Bat Teleview Center to view inside the cave using the infrared cameras. There are five cameras set up in the cave that allow us to pan around and see the bats in the cave, and also to zoom in to watch their behavior. This will be especially useful when the pups are born (usually in early December). We can watch mother-pup interactions and also watch for pup die-offs and disease. After each emergence count, I check with the cameras to see if there are bats still left inside. After I finished that task, I got into the mule to head back home. I put the key and turned the ignition and got silence. It wouldn’t start. The battery has been giving me problems lately, but I had charged it before going out and it had been running fine today. But just my luck it putzed out on me when I had my equipment with me. It’s not too far of a walk back (about 15 minutes) and I have been walking back the past several nights, but I was looking forward to a speedy return and the ease of using the mule to carry stuff. Resigned to my fate, and with one final glare at the mule, I headed off walking in the dark (of course with my headlamp). I was slightly bemoaning my fate as I walked along when I saw small, glowing eyes on the side of the path ahead of me. I immediately knew they were spider eyes (a tidbit I learned in Girl Scouts!), so I stopped to have a look. It was a large wolf spider. I got closer and I realized it was actually TWO wolf spiders, one on top of the other. I sat and watched them for several minutes and realized I had the fortune of happening upon them mating! The smaller male was on the back of the female facing her hind legs. She held still while he used his palps to deliver his semen to her genital opening. After a few minutes he scurried off of her and waited about a foot away while she crawled several inches and started to tap the ground. She felt around and eventually lifted up a dirt door and crawled inside her burrow. The male then scurried away. I’m not sure if the female would have eaten him if I hadn’t been there disturbing them (in some species of wolf spiders the female eats the male after mating) but in this case the male lived to see another day. As I walked back the rest of the way home I realized how fortunate I was that the mule broke down. If it hadn’t I would have whizzed right on by that spectacle of the natural world!