Marbled Orb Weaver (don't look if you think spiders are gross)

As I crash through the woods, there's this one kind of spider that I always run into, unless I see it in time and manage to stop half an inch before I walk face-first into the web. This is not it.

Marbled Orb Weaver, Araneus marmoreus

Marbled Orb Weaver, another one

Yet another one, quite a bit bigger than the first two

Another view, all tangled up in the leaves. These are all females

I didn't see these at all until mid-September. Now they seem to be all over the place.

The markings in the black-and-yellow zone look just like batik, to me. Their red-orange legs are so bright in the woods.

A ball of many spiderlings

Undisturbed

In the woods, looking for mushrooms, I kept seeing these little yellow clumps of something that looked like seed pods or something. It was made up of individual balls about the size of a millet seed, like in birdseed. I actually thought a bird had regurgitated a lump of seed hulls (not knowing if anybody actually does that, besides owls--here's a nice one). Finally I decided to take a closer look at one (almost everything's worth taking a closer look at, I've discovered), and when I reached down to move aside some leaves, the whole thing--well, "exploded" is a good word. Only not very fast, and quietly.

So then I kept finding them, and I would blow a puff of breath on them and watch them do that.

They are a type of orb weaver spider, according
to the crew at bugguide.net.                                             

Slightly disturbed

Fully disturbed

I haven't sat around and watched them pull back together into a ball, which I assume they do, but who knows. What I do know is they are really, really tiny cute little yellow spiderlings.