Agelena consociata is a social species of funnel web spider that occurs in tropical forests in West Africa and lives in colonies of one to several hundred individuals.

It favors dense forests along creeks where colonies can build huge complex webs.

It has been proposed that sociality evolved from a subsocial spider species through the acquisition of three main behavioral traits: postmating dispersal, inbreeding, and cooperative care of offspring.

[2] Spiders that live in groups can be divided into two main categories, colonial and cooperative, each showing reduced characteristics of solitary behavior.

They share nests and webs that consist of horizontal sheets with vertical scaffoldings, which serve as traps for capturing prey.

The web structure consists of individual nests connected by flat sheets of silk supported by vertical scaffolding threads.

Eggs are laid at times of high humidity and there are a large number of cocoons between November and January.

The spider could be more susceptible to a single parasite or a natural disaster since they are all genetically similar and remain in one colony.

Their lack of dispersion, heterogeneity, and relatedness all suggest that kin selection plays a major role in the cooperativity of individuals.

[1] It is thought that this species may have developed colonial behaviour because of the difficulty of dispersal in the rainforest environment.

Other reasons might be the individual cost of repeatedly repairing a web frequently damaged by tropical downpours and particularly, because of the continuity of generations that occurs, a thing that is not possible in cooler climates.