Check out this little guy. He is a spiny-backed orbweaver. Typically the females of this species are much more noticeable. On St. Martin, they are some combination red, black, white and yellow and have four spines coming out of their abdomen (in North America, this species has six spines). They build large webs, with extra silk used to create a dotted line around the edge of the web. One hypothesis is that this dotted line makes the web visible to birds, so they avoid the web and the spiders don’t have to remake webs after they are accidentally destroyed by birds.
But back to this guy. He’s a male. I thought he might have been a juvenile at first, but males are much smaller than females, and he seems to have loaded pedipalps. If you don’t know what a pedipalp is and what it gets loaded with, they are small leg-like appendages that are found on either side of a spiders mouth. Male spiders have a bulb at the end of their pedipalps which they fill with sperm, and then they use the pedipalp to deposit the sperm into the female spider.
