Wolf Spider At Night

Members of the Family, Lycosidae, these spiders are one of my all time favourites. They carry their egg sack under their bum and when the eggs hatch, the spiderlings crawl up onto their mother's back and ride along with her for a few days before making their own way in the world. Agile as ever, she still manages to hunt throughout... Wolf Spiders have 8 eyes!! They rely on their eyesight for hunting and have the third best eyesight of all spiders (Jumping and Huntsman Spiders just pip them to the post there). They have two unusually large forward facing eyes that you can see here, that have their own secret. One that fills me with delight every time I see it. If you use a headtorch (it has to be a headtorch because the light angle must be similar to your angle of sight for this to work) to shine light on them at night, their eyes glow. Green, purple, orange, red, yellow, blue, white - any colour basically, depending on the spider. If you're in a sparsely vegetated area where a lot of them hang out, such as sand dunes, you're in for a treat - they're like stars in the sand.