Mary has been away in Texas with our grandson for three long lonely weeks, and she just came home late last night…and we just got back from the airport a short while ago. She came with presents for me! You’ll never guess what they are.
Here, have a few. These are from my collection of juvenile P. tepidariorum.
I can tell this one is going to be a big boy.
Webs! This one is an artist.
While this one is looking at me and making mystical gestures.
Hey, I’ve had dozens and dozens of trick-or-treaters come to my house tonight, and I’m nearly out of candy. Would it be OK if I started handing out spiders?
This might be a little weird for most of you, but it’s Jenny Nicholson reading reviews of fake spiders from Amazon, and it resonated with me, because I too have browsed Amazon for spiders, and I have a few fake spiders — and fake cephalopods — decorating my home right now.
It’s a thing. If you were a member of the cult, you’d understand. You know, “Four legs good, two legs bad, eight legs unholy harbinger of the apocalypse,” all that jazz.
…who’s the fairest of them all?
Repeat after me: coxa, trochanter, femur, patella, tibia, metatarsus, tarsus. Repeat 8 times. Now you can name all the segments in a spider limb!
So flexible!
Here’s a juvenile S. borealis, ventral side up, on a bright orange background.
S. borealis is different — where P. tepidariorum builds intricate three-dimensional webs and likes to hang suspended in space in the middle of them, borealis hugs corners and surfaces, and builds denser, sheet-like webs. They just have a different lifestyle.
It’s unfortunate that she wouldn’t roll over for me, because she has a lovely white dorsal median stripe on a dark body.
This one is P. tepidariorum, and is just a wee little baby, less than two weeks old…but filling out fast.
You might be able to see wisps of its web, but it just doesn’t show up well on this light blue background. I tried to highlight it by misting the container with water, which is why you see little droplets everywhere.
I’m still taking this new lens on a shakedown, working out effective ways to photograph developing spiders. Today was all about trying to get a feel for where the focus is (spoiler: it’s way out there) and how to position camera and lights and specimen, so nothing exciting to report.
So which background do you like, light or dark?
I’m kind of leaning towards the darker backgrounds, since it brings out the webs they’re on, and a spider is intimately connected to its web. On the other hand, since the goal here is to map pigment development, the lighter background makes that snap a bit more and removes the distractions, at the expense of leaving the subject looking like it’s floating in space.
Both photos are of the same animal, Steatoda triangulosa, a young juvenile that’s about a month and a half old.
I enjoyed the video, but it definitely needed more spiders, instead of just alluding to them.
Awesome stuff! Check it out.
I’m tinkering with getting better images of these silly spiders, and my latest attempt is to build a little itty-bitty photographic studio on a benchtop. I can mount light sources and reflectors on the bench, play with backgrounds, and position specimens where I want — they are extremely obliging models, as long as I’m bringing in the whole cardboard frame their webs are structured around, which is a slight limitation, because the space has to be big enough for not just the spiders, but also their whole cage. I’m also putting the camera on a tripod and locking it down — it’s heavy — and just manipulating the airy light spiders to get them in position.
They’re all good girls. As long as I’m not messing with the web, they are quite calm and well-behaved, so I can just leave these venomous spiders out of their cages as long as I want and they don’t try to escape or get aggressive at all, they rest suspended happily while I move gadgets around them. I was also able to get some respectable video out of the set up, too, so you might have that to look forward to, too.
