there are two female Pholcus phalangioides cohabiting the same web in our bathroom. they've been there for about a week. this is baffling because they are definitively not social. they typically eat whatever ends up in the same web, including other P. phalangioides. the extent of their association is mating (where the male is often eaten afterwards), and a nine-day period where the mother watches newly hatched spiderlings. there are no spiderlings. one of them might be gravid but they're too distant for me to be able to say that with any kind of likelihood, it's just a possibility bc her opisthosoma is a little bit bigger. (you can tell the difference between the two bc one of them is missing a leg + has the larger opisthosoma.)
there's no way they aren't aware of each other. these spiders sense by vibration, you can't share a web with a pholcid and have them just not know about it, and they routinely swap positions in the web (ms. missing leg is often on the opposite side of ms. 8 legs that she was when last observed).
obviously i'm not mad about this, it's fascinating behavior and i feel so privileged to get to see it, but i have absolutely zero explanation for it. in my investigation so far i haven't been able to find any documented association between pholcids that isn't mating or motherhood or cannibalism. they're sedentary web hunters, they can't afford to share a capture web with another conspecific, and there are almost no flying insects in our bathroom (their web is in the corner of the ceiling out in the open, which is also kind of unusual for pholcids, they tend to prefer going below overhangs, and i suspect they'd actually have more success with a web on the floor bc we Do get crawlers like millipedes and carpet beetle larvae pretty frequently, but also we keep the bathroom dark 100% of the time even when in use bc of my photosensitivity so perhaps they've been tricked into thinking this is more secure than it is based on the light levels?), so i have no idea how they're getting enough prey for the both of them. surely they can't be sharing?? i haven't actually seen them capture anything in this web so far but obviously it's possible i've missed something, i only watch them when i'm in the bathroom.
i can't help but think eventually one of them is going to eat the other, which will be sad for me personally because i've grown quite fond of them but i do want at least one of them to live. and i just can't imagine they're getting much prey. should we try to capture a fly or something and tenderly feed it to them. well, 2 flies, i guess. i don't think pholcids would make ideal pets just bc they're relatively skittish and not very visual compared to salticids. but i do love them both and i want them to eat well.
i think i'm going to have to take some better photos and maybe send some of my observations to some arachnologists, i'm like did we misidentify them? i have no idea what else would have the pholcid body plan lol it's pretty obvious (cosmopolitan cellar spider/"daddy longlegs"). or is there some explanation i haven't considered? i just can't emphasize enough that these are so solitary that they will eat each other if one sees another, which is not an uncommon behavior for spiders (especially sedentary web hunters, for prey access reasons) but some others will have some kind of associative behavior documented Somewhere. these do not!!! they don't have enough body mass to be able to afford that kind of competition! what is going ON
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