Thin-legged Wolf Spider in carbon pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is carry. I usually make an effort to do a doodle specifically for the word (actually, that's really why I bother participating at all. I'm not an artist. I'm sometimes pretty uncomfortable putting my stuff anywhere near those of you who are. At least IF gives me a reason to keep practicing, though), but it's not going to happen this week from the looks of it. So, rather than miss another week, here's an oldie. It was done for a spider display at work.

Wolf Spiders and Nursery Web Spiders are unusual in the spider world in that, rather than make an egg case and guard it, or make an egg case and just plain die, they carry their egg sacs with them. For the Nursery Web Spiders it must be massively difficult -- they carry theirs on their jaws. Wolf Spiders, however, attach theirs to their spinnerets and drag them around with them while the spiderlings develop.

They're not done even when the eggs hatch, though. The dozens of tiny spiderlings climb up on their mother's back and hitch a ride until they're big enough to fend for themselves.

Pretty nifty parenting for an invertebrate.

This spider is a Pardosa sp (no idea of the sp. We have a few spp around here, and I couldn't begin to tell them apart. And incidentally, I've totally been saying sp as "spuh" in my head as I've been typing this) that I found on my father's pond liner conveniently just as I was starting to create the display. I'm not sure she was a willing model, but at least she stayed long enough for a reference photo.