Momma Banana Spider

This past month, I have been keeping up with a spider I found in my friend's front yard garden. I first found it about a month ago when I came over to hang out. It scared the life out of me as I spotted it to my left in the garden as I walked up my friend's font porch. It was a huge yellow scary looking spider; a kind I have never seen before. I told my friend about it and we were quickly intrigued. I quickly researched it on my phone and figured out it is a garden spider commonly referred to as a "banana spider". This is what it looked like:

It became a ritual of checking on the spider every time I came over to my friend's house after that. I started referring to it as our "pet". My friend would even feed it moths sometimes. So when I saw the spider about a week later and it was really fat, I just thought it was because it was eating well. Little did I know, the banana spider was pregnant! This is what she looked like pregnant (look at the difference in size!):

About a week after that is when we actually came to the realization that she was pregnant, not just fat. The way we knew this was because she had not only returned to her natural size, but she had laid a HUGE egg sack with millions of babies! Check out how big its egg sack was (compare it to the size of the spider):

As much as I hate spiders, it was really cool to witness the life cycle of this momma banana spider. I am sorry to say, but this story has a sad ending... my friend had to destroy the egg sack with a shovel so his kids wouldn't have to worry about getting bit by tons of baby spiders every time they walked up the front porch. Needless to say, the momma spider still lives there to this day.