Moved from Black and Yellow Argiope. Hi Sue. I've moved these back out to family level because we've had some discussion that these might be Araneus spiderlings intead of A. aurantia. I did some research and found a nice PDF article about aurantia spiderlings. Here is one section "Although both species are capable of all the behaviors in the ethogram, Argiope aurantia, possibly by virtue of their higher, more exposed egg sac locations, generally dispersed shortly after emergence from the egg sac. Argiope trifasciata produced communal tangles and engaged in preaeronautic behaviors on these structures before dispersing."

It sounds like this communal behavior seen in your photos is not common for A. aurantia. It is common for A. trifasciata and it's certainly common for some Araneus species. Hopefully we will be able to learn more about this and place these correctly. I also found a few images of supposed A. aurantia spiderling images. See here and here.

Cool photo.