1985] 
Wise & Reillo — Enoplognatha 
137 
which are often pulled down slightly by silk lines. This retreat is 
readily noticeable when examining vegetation, and the one con- 
structed by the female for her egg sac is particularly obvious. Most 
females deposit a single sac in July or August, which they guard in a 
rolled leaf. The 2nd instar spiderlings emerge after several weeks 
and disperse in September through October. These instars overwin- 
ter in the leaf litter and in early spring build small webs in the curls 
of dead leaves. At this stage they were the most abundant spider in 
the litter community of one ecosystem studied (Stevenson and Din- 
dal 1982; the population that they studied was the same central New 
York population that we examined). As the juveniles begin to molt 
they move into living vegetation where they build small webs similar 
to those of adults, though the younger instars do not consistently 
curl down the edges of leaves. 
Sampling the North American Populations 
During 13-17 July 1983 we surveyed morph frequencies of penul- 
timate and adult E. ovata in several local populations in each of four 
different regions: Mt. Desert Island in Maine, October Mountain 
State Forest in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, 
Huyck Nature Preserve in eastern New York, and the Lafayette 
Experimental Station of SUNY Syracuse in central New York (Fig. 
1). Local populations were defined primarily as dense aggregations 
of E. ovata in contiguous stands of vegetation. After locating an 
aggregation, we continued to move systematically through that 
patch of vegetation until E. ovata was no longer common, or until 
we had scored approximately 50 spiders. This latter criterion was 
used primarily in Syracuse, where the vegetation suitable for habita- 
tion by E. ovata was continuous over large areas of the forest. The 
local populations were 50m to several km apart. We examined each 
patch carefully, but did not make an exhaustive survey of each 
geographical area to determine the number of local populations. 
Instead, we attempted to examine as many different geographic 
regions as possible, spending from under a day (Syracuse) to two 
days (Maine) in each area. We scored a total of 1 107 spiders in these 
four areas, but in presenting frequencies in local populations within 
each region we have only included those with 20 or more 
individuals. 
