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A baby spider is born...
It is winter now. The days are short and the nights are very cold. But you can't see the daylight or feel the bitter wind because you are snug in your egg sac. Last autumn, your mother made the egg sac from her silk and hung it from a fence post in a field. She laid her eggs inside. You've been here ever since. Things are crowded inside the sac that you share with several hundred of your brothers and sisters, but it's comfortable, too. The wind whips around your egg sac and driving rains beats down on you. But inside your egg sac, you are safe and dry.
Winter turns into spring. The sun is brighter and warmer. Droplets of water from a spring rain splash gently on your egg sac.
Inside the sac, you feel the urge to stretch and move. . . stretch all your legs out. Suddenly, you are out of your egg sac and standing tall, soaking in the sunlight. You are a spiderling. Even though you are tiny, you look just like your mother spider.
Leaving home...
You climb up on a tall bush. A gentle breeze blows and you let out a line of silken thread from your spinnerets. The breeze blows playfully on the thread and you feel its pull. You let out more thread. A stronger breeze comes and picks up the threads. Suddenly, you're carried on the breeze, attached to your waving threads. Up and up you go until the trees and houses below shrink away from sight.
The breeze becomes more gentle, and you begin to drop slowly down. A stronger gust tosses you up again, but as it fades, you come down again. Slowly and gently you fall, until you are moving over a field of tall grasses. You stretch out some of your legs and grab onto a blade of grass. It's been a long journey and an exciting day. You crawl under a nearby leaf and sleep for a while.
When you wake up, you crawl up to the top of a blade of grass and 1et out a line of thread, and it blows on the breeze. You let out more silk, and the line gets longer until it touches and sticks to another blade of grass not far away. You run along your thread, laying down more lines. Connecting each line to nearby blades of grass, you work until you have completed a framework of threads. Then, very carefully and starting from the middle of your framework, you walk in a spiral laying down a sticky thread behind you as you go. Without anyone having to teach you, you have made a strong web. You crawl back under your leaf to rest.
A real spider at last!
You are safe under your leaf. By touching a single thread, you can feel the movements of your web. Through your strand, you can feel the web blowing gently in the breeze. Suddenly. . . thump. . . something LARGE hits your web. You awaken with a start. Something in your web struggles, making your web bend and twist, and sending strong tugs on the line you touch.
Slowly and cautiously, you crawl out from under the leaf. Balancing carefully, you move across your shaking web towards the struggling creature which will be your first dinner. Your life as a spider has really begun.