Three levels of spiders

Evidently his first time out in the mid-morning shade since he was weaned, a pudgy boy of ten or eleven was bawling his lungs out halfway up the hill, cursing his weekend and tempting the tuk-tuking girl to seek a means of ending his red-faced misery. One suggested solution was to lavish a feast of fatty meat on the silken drapery that lined the road, but my duck thought this would prove too rich a reward for the orbweavers that were out in force. St. Andrew's Cross spiders, with their lanky limbs folded to mark the sweet spot, had spun large webs at eye level amidst the wayside vegetation. The females, with their gaudy opisthosomas boasting unflattering stripes, are easily seen but readily drop into the litter when disturbed by dodgy ducks. Near the ladies, juveniles and growing men lurked in smaller orbs. Some have palps swollen with spermatozoa, perhaps in anticipation of the female's final moult that marks her readiness to mate.      

A little closer to the ground, Cyclosa spiders had spun orb webs in close proximity to each other, forming a three-dimensional gauntlet of latticed traps. Small and shabbily clad, the spiders lace their webs with debris and dried bodies to distract the attention of their own foes, betting that half-a-dozen decoys would offer a goodly chance for evasive action against waspish aggressors. Sharing their waist-level zone are crab spiders such as this pale ambusher on a twig. The octet of beady eyes are close-sighted, so she probably thought my fowl movements signalled a tasty encounter and accordingly positioned her forelegs for a final embrace.         

Already sated, this jumper had her fangs firmly embedded in an unidentifiable tube of still writhing flesh. The husky found a few ant-mimicking salticids but the only imitator I could capture was a sac spider that waved its second pair of legs to ape the restless antennae of formicid workers.

At the bend after the summit we came across this gorilla-faced ground level hunter. At first, I thought it was a lycosid, but the arrangement of the eyes suggests this is a ctenid, one of a family of ill-tempered prowlers with nasty bites. According to this dubious source, kisses from these spiderwomen can result in prolonged moments of woody discomfort. By the time we ran into this wanderer, it was alas too late to reconsider our plans to introduce such intimacies to the said youth and his wailed longings for a soft bed free of hard knocks...