Spider Question: what have I witnessed?

[Disastrous]

I’ve had a false widow spider living in my gate for the last few months. Web between two uprights and I presume it lives inside it as we never see it during the day but without fail it’s there when I walk the dog last thing.

Got fairly big but disappeared completely a couple of weeks back. I knocked the web down to see if it would encourage it to reappear but it didn’t rebuild it so I assumed it had been got by a predator or some such.

Tonight, however, a False widow was building it’s web, back in place...EXCEPT...it’s not the same spider. VERY similar but significantly smaller than the previous one.

So what’s happened? Original a mother that has had a baby? Junior killed her and taken over the family firm??

I can’t find any info about spider habits so hoping there might be a false widow expert here who can shed some light...

[Nightmare]

My guess is that you last saw her after she had fed well. She went off to do spider things (you have to be in the right club to be told what those are, sorry) and then came back and span a new web once her resources had been depleted and she’d got smaller again and needed to feed.

This is (obviously!) a guess but they do change size a fair bit between meals

[Disastrous]

Nightmare said:

My guess is that you last saw her after she had fed well. She went off to do spider things (you have to be in the right club to be told what those are, sorry) and then came back and span a new web once her resources had been depleted and she’d got smaller again and needed to feed.

This is (obviously!) a guess but they do change size a fair bit between meals

Hmm, I didn’t know they grew/shrunk...but the leg development was the most noticeable difference. Spider 2.0 has noticeably thinner, shorter legs. I’m convinced it’s an imposter.

I’ll try and take a picture to compare.

[AlexC1981]

False widows are an invasive species from the Canary Islands and can give a nasty bite. Kill the blighter!

[Nightmare]

Hmm....to be fair their legs won’t get smaller! In which case it’s probably a racket. The first spider owns that hood and is sub-letting to spider 2. Strictly against web rules, but they’re Canarian, so what you gonna do?

Canarian sounds unlikely