Green Lynx Spider, Predator & Mother

I moved from Oregon to Wilmington when I retired, four years ago. Because I fancy myself a “Master Naturalist” I quickly began working to develop familiarity with this region’s biota and a basic understanding of its ecology. In the process, I encountered many plants and animals new to me. This essay highlights a local resident that I find fascinating—the Green Lynx Spider—a paragon of hunting prowess, and of parental care.

Green Lynx Spiders are large spiders with elongate translucent green bodies variably marked with reddish, whitish, or tan spots and lines, and long legs adorned with scattered black spines. They range across the southern United States from Virginia to California, and south into Mexico. They are fairly common in the Wilmington area, particularly in Longleaf Pine woodlands, where they frequent the understory wildflowers.

A quick introduction to spider anatomy: spiders have two body segments, a cephalothorax and an abdomen. Think of the cephalothorax as the front two sections of an insect—head and thorax, fused together, making them totally neckless. They have two down-pointed fangs guarding the mouth, and usually eight (!) eyes variously arranged on the front of the cephalothorax. They have eight legs, all attached to the underside of the cephalothorax. The abdomen contains most of the digestive system, the reproductive organs and the silk-producing spinnerets.

Female Green Lynx Spiders grow to a body length of about one inch, and may span nearly three inches across their legs. Males are a bit smaller. They have somewhat pear-shaped cephalothoraxes. Abdomens are usually narrow and elongate, but in females, swell to the shape of a football before laying eggs.

Green Lynx Spiders are ambush predators that hunt insect prey on flowers and foliage. They do not build webs, but they do have silk, which they use to construct their egg sacs and shroud, and occasionally use as safety lines. They stalk their prey on the stems, leaves and blossoms of plants and lunge or jump to capture them. They readily take prey much heavier than themselves. When they are hunting in the foliage of plants, they eat a lot of herbivorous insects, including some crop pests. When they are hunting on or around blooming flowers, however, they prey extensively on bees, wasps, flies, butterflies and other pollinators of the flowers.

Green Lynx Spider with a captured Carpenter Bee.

Spider on Orange Fringed Orchid with captured Cloudless Sulphur butterfly.

Spider on goldenrod with captured Great Black Wasp

Spider with captured Eastern Leaf-footed Bug.

Spider on Gerardia with captured bumblebee, and nearly ready to lay eggs.

Spider with grasshopper. This spider has suspended itself and its prey from silk safety lines.

Green Lynx Spiders have an annual life cycle, at least in the United States. Eggs are laid in fall and hatch in a few weeks. The spiderlings overwinter on the ground in leaf litter, and climb into the vegetation in spring. They grow and mature through the summer, and mate in late summer or early fall. A female lays her eggs in a single irregularly-shaped egg sac, constructed of grayish or tan silk, and surrounded by a loose shroud of silk threads. She quits eating at this point, and spends the rest of her lives guarding her eggs and spiderlings. The spiderlings begin to emerge from the egg sac in a few weeks, but remain near it within the shroud for another month or so, before dispersing to the ground for the winter.

In fall 2021 I located eight female Green Lynx Spiders with egg sacs at a location in the Holly Shelter Game Lands near Hampstead, and visited them repeatedly, checking on their progress. They laid the eggs in late September and early October. The egg sacs were all located near the tops of herbaceous flowering plants, and remained there after the plants seeded and dried up. The females remained within a few inches of the eggs all fall. They changed color once they laid their eggs, becoming dull reddish and tan, blending into the dried vegetation. As the fall progressed they shrank visibly, to perhaps half their pre-laying size. The spiderlings began emerging in a few weeks. They had ovate reddish abdomens and dark gray legs. Initially they tended to stay piled in tight clumps, but after a few weeks, sometimes spread out a bit within the silk shroud. Seven of the adult spiders remained with their eggs and young into early December, but one disappeared weeks before the rest. Her young remained as long as the attended ones, and I think dispersed on schedule. I have been back to this site recently, and am happy to report that it is again well-populated with these femmes fatale.

Wayne Hoffman moved to Wilmington in 2018, after a career in conservation. In the 1980s and 1990s he studied habitat needs of birds in a variety of natural and managed landscapes across North America. For the last 20 years of his career he worked in Oregon on stream ecology and habitat restoration, focused on improving rearing habitat for endangered salmon. He is an avid nature photographer, and uses his photography to study and document the lives and behavior of his subjects.