How a mystery spider's 'candyfloss' egg sac spun a worldwide web of links

A tiny blob on a plant captured the attention of Singaporean freelance photographer Nicky Bay in January — and mystified him.

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From a distance, the 2cm-long pouch looked like the usual structure that spiders weave to shield their young from larger predators. But the silken sac resembled candyfloss, the likes of which Mr Bay, an arachnid aficionado, had never seen before.

Mr Bay had been out for a night walk in western Singapore with some friends when one of them noticed the spider egg sac and alerted him to it.

"Most people will just look at it from afar and dismiss it as just a normal, white egg sac. But us being us, we examine everything," said Mr Bay, 47. He and his group of friends are part of a growing community of macro photography enthusiasts around the world who capture extreme close-ups of tiny creatures.

Unlike the spider egg sacs Mr Bay had come across in his 17 years of macro photography, this was decked out in dark pink threads. The spider was nowhere in sight.

Determined to uncover the identity of the mystery spider, he uploaded his photographs of the sac to flora and fauna database iNaturalist, run by the US-based non-profit with the same name, where laymen can tap the expertise of scientists and naturalists, as well as artificial intelligence, to identify wildlife.

It took the internet just three days to crack the case.

Among the earliest people to take a stab at the spider's identity was public relations strategist David Jeffrey Ringer, a New York-based naturalist who sifts through sightings on iNaturalist nearly every day.

"I have helped identify photographs of some species that haven't been positively identified since their original scientific descriptions in the 19th century," Mr Ringer told The Straits Times. "So there's a strong thrill of discovery and adventure."

The American likes to browse photos of unclassified orb-weaving spiders — so named for their spiral wheel-shaped webs — from tropical and subtropical Africa, Asia and Australasia, areas which boast a high diversity of such creatures.