Not for arachnophobes, nor for the sqeamish

Poststructural Pub
1

When I went out to get the mail this afternoon, I noticed this little jumping spider on the front wall of our house, so I ran and got my camera (Nikon Coolpix 4500).

She moved along at a pretty good clip, so I was trying to focus and shoot on the move. Also, the sun was mighty bright. Still, I got a couple of good shots.

She was pretty feisty. Whenever the camera got to within about an inch of her, first she’d rear up and wave her front legs at it. Then she’d jump right onto it, and immediately jump back off. I imagine that might startle a bird or other predator. (She’s close to 3/4" long.)

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I was wondering if the bright green color of the fangs serves some purpose–like distracting its prey. Jumping spiders (as you can see) have good binocular vision, which means good depth perception, so that they can hit what they jump at. Most web building spiders have very poor vision by comparison. (My son says that the fangs are covered with a fine, velvety fur.)

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You can see another rudimentary eye (oculus) on the side of her head. That’s mainly for threat detection.

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A couple of weeks back, my son spotted this wolf spider impaled on a pecan tree twig. The next day, I took this photo, and it was still soft to the touch. A couple of days later, it was gone. It was put there by a shrike, AKA butcher bird. They hang their prey on thorns and barbed wire, apparently to ripen in the sun. Down on the Gulf Coast, I’ve seen locusts, dragonflies, lizards, and small garter snakes hanging on barbed wire fences.

Haven’t seen much in the way of photogenic insects so far, but I have hopes that they’ll show up as the summer comes along–and we get some flowers planted.

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Spiders are cool. Thanks for sharing the great photos. :thumbsup:

3

Nice shots!

…maybe she could breath some life back into the the Cutie Pie thread!

Denny

4

Good proof of what you can do with a consumer-grade digital camera (I have a 4300) as per other thread. Nice shots!! Are you using Auto mode with the flower (macro) setting or manual mode?

5

I dunno. Amar freaked out when I put up [u]a picture of a yellowjacket eating one of my baby praying mantises, and another of a mantis eating a small insect[/u].

Edited to add: The original praying mantis baby pictures are [u]on the previous page[/u].

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It was set to macro mode, with auto exposure. I tend use the shutter priority setting to force a minimum shutter speed when it’s gloomy, as it often was in Salinas, but with the sun like it was today, and me shooting from below, I just didn’t want to take a chance on underexposing the main subject.

The 4500 will focus up to 0.8 inches, and the split body lets you use the LCD while shooting at any angle, so it’s the perfect macro camera.

What’s sad is that Nikon is no longer making any of the split-bodied cameras. I’d love to have a 6-megapixel version of the 4500 (it’s 4 mp). A flip-out LCD just isn’t the same thing. I’ve shot pictures with the entire camera stuck down into a bush, with the lens pointing back toward me. It’s great.

7

excellent pictures, Dar! I have to admit, that it gave me the heebies to look, but your photographs are just so phenomenal that I have to look at them. :slight_smile: I really wish I could take pictures like that. Thanks for putting them up!

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Thanks, but I’m sure you could. It’s not hard like playing the whistle. All you need is the equipment and the time to use it (and maybe Photoshop, if you’re as bad at in-camera composition as I am :stuck_out_tongue:).

9

I am arachnophilic rather than phobic.

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:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

I just wish I knew where we went wrong with the raising of my granddaughter. :cry:

11

Agreed. You did give us fair warning but of course that just heightens the curiosity. Amazing pictures nevertheless :wink:

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A long time ago, I spent a summer renovating a house for my father. I lived in the workplace and cooked and ate meals on the patio during those three months.

Ground hornets would be attracted by my food, and it was not unusual to have a hornet cleaning up my spoon for me between bites. I’ve never minded hornets and bees if they seem calm, as these did, so my only concern was to be careful not to accidentally bite one.

There were tiny spiders that would come along. Sometimes, I would find one on my hand. I discovered that they would climb to the highest place they could get to. I would hold my hand with the fingers pointing up, and before long, a little spider would be perched on my fingertip. The amazing thing about these little creatures was how they could jump. I would spread my fingers apart as far as possible and, being able to go no further upwards, the spider would jump from fingertip to fingertip. It seemed to me, that wasn’t only a demonstration of jumping ability, but also of the clarity of the spider’s stereoscopic vision.

There were sweat bees, too, and it was hot so I sweated. Although they could sting if accidentally confined, they were docile if left alone. All they really wanted was to mop up a drink of perspiration, so I would leave them alone. I’ve had small butterflies alight on me to get a drink, also.

Hummingbirds would come right up to my face there, too, hover for a moment to look me over, and zoom away. It was sort of an enchanted little spot.

Thanks for reminding me of that.

Best wishes,
Jerry

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I was at a Bluegrass festival in North Carolina one time and some folks had a big picnic table set up at their campsite. At one point, there was a cake with thick chocolate icing set out on the table, and yellowjackets were doing the La Brea thing there.

That wasn’t so bad, because you could still see them, but then someone noticed one crawling down into a can of coke, and everybody went crazy dumping their canned beverages into clear plastic cups.

Finally there got to be too many of them flying all around, and someone put out several cups of red wine, and that was the end of the poor yellowjackets. Drinking can kill you, you know.

There were tiny spiders that would come along. Sometimes, I would find one on my hand. I discovered that they would climb to the highest place they could get to. I would hold my hand with the fingers pointing up, and before long, a little spider would be perched on my fingertip. The amazing thing about these little creatures was how they could jump. I would spread my fingers apart as far as possible and, being able to go no further upwards, the spider would jump from fingertip to fingertip. It seemed to me, that wasn’t only a demonstration of jumping ability, but also of the clarity of the spider’s stereoscopic vision.

Here’s a little one that appeared on my hand one day while I was out chasing insects in the flower bed.

Here he is on my sweatshirt. Unfortunately, the threads caught the focus. However, the size of the threads on this normal sweatshirt shows how tiny he was.

One of the good things about this area, according to my daughter-in-law, is that there is a nice variety of spiders.

There were sweat bees, too, and it was hot so I sweated. Although they could sting if accidentally confined, they were docile if left alone. All they really wanted was to mop up a drink of perspiration, so I would leave them alone. I’ve had small butterflies alight on me to get a drink, also.

Back when I had hair, while stationed at Ft. Bragg, I would go out to the archery range at the Rod & Gun Club for a bit of knife and tomahawk throwing, and the blagstaggin’ sweat bees would burrow down into my hair. I never got stung, but it was very uncomfortable to feel them wandering around on my scalp. I tried one of those aeresol insect repellents, and that was even worse. I thought I’d never get the smell out of my hair and skin.

Hummingbirds would come right up to my face there, too, hover for a moment to look me over, and zoom away. It was sort of an enchanted little spot.

There’s a site with [u]photos of hummingbirds being hand fed[/u]. If you ever go back to your enchanted spot, maybe you could do that, too.

I’m hoping to attract some to our new house. We had a few regulars in Salinas and I got [u]a few good shots[/u], but nothing to compare with [u]Uncle Frank’s Hummer Kingdom[/u].

14

Those pictures are worthy of National Geographic.

Arachniphobe here. Very aracnicidal. Praying Mantis’ are my favorite of all bugs.

So you have a Nikon 4500? Are you using any additional lens attachments? I want one.

15

Every morning for several weeks last summer, I had noticed a few strands of webbing stretched from the front bumper of the car next to mine to the roof upright or to the concrete stop in front of the car. Single strands never bothered me. I had never seen the spider(s) to whom the strands belonged.

To get to my car the short way, without taking the walkway, I go through a row of shrubbery, between cars in two rows, pick my way across a section of rocks (requiring that I look down) and then between a carport upright and the driver’s side fender on my car.

Now, I have a longstanding practice of never brushing against any environmental objects in Florida. I never brush against tall grass, flowers, shrubs, or inanimate objects, and I routinely check underneath patio furniture before sitting in it. Should I leave shoes outside by accident, I will throw them out rather than risk death or disfigurement by wearing them ever again. Even shoes in my own home get banged out, and I greatly prefer shoes you can see through, like Birkenstocks, for the simple reason that nothing can hide in them.

One morning, rushing to get to work, I was just ready to go between the upright pole and the fender, when I noticed one end of a long strand of web attached to the driver’s side door of my car. How odd.

Bold little devil, hmmm. Wonder where it goes? I followed it up, and up, and . . . oh, gee . . . it’s coming toward me . . . and I suddenly grew very concerned and extrapolated the other end of the web to be affixed to the pole right in front of me . . .

At which point I looked up to see this hanging directly in front of my eyes, no more than an inch or so away–this is exactly how big it was, too:

It was guarding an egg case.

I don’t consciously remember levitating backward, but I achieved a considerable distance, doing the heebie-jeebie dance the whole way.

I was a half-hour late for work, as I had to go find a can of Raid and spray the thing repeatedly. And nothing happened. It hardly twitched. It was annoyed that the web got wet, but that’s about it.

My mother finally had enough. She snarled “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Peggy Ann,” whipped out an umbrella, and smashed the thing into oblivion against the carport pole.

I am now very careful about walking around in the parking lot, particularly if I have to do it before dawn.

Brrrrrrrr!

16

When we were first in Germany some 48 years ago someone threw a scare into my mother with tales of terrible jumping spiders. One day while doing some housework she saw a particularly large spider on the carpet. Thinking “better safe than sorry” she tried to get rid of it by sucking it up the vacuum cleaner she was using at the time. Sure enough, whenever she got near to it, it would jump clear of the nozzle and after a while gave up and yelled for my dad to get it. Luckily he quickly realised she’d attached the vacuum tube to the wrong end and had been blowing the poor arachnid from pillar to post for the last five minutes.

He was sworn to secrecy which, of course, meant everybody on the base knew about it within the hour.

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When we lived in El Paso, and the teenagers in my house were the wee ones, we had a huge problem with Black Widows on the house behind the bushes (not to mention scorpions in the front yard). The kids, being budding entomologists even back then, wanted to catch them and play with them, much to my chagrin. I was always terrified that they would try one day when I wasn’t looking.
It’s funny that my children are such “bug people”. They used to love to study the Praying Mantises in the yard and give food to the spider that had a funnel type web next to the apple tree (this being long after we left lovely Ft. Bliss in El Paso)…I always did feel badly for the crickets though, as those were usually the food of choice. I really thought that my now 14 year old son would absolutely be an entomologist. I even armed myself with tons of information about the insects we had in our yard so I could tell him all about them. He still has a fascination, but he’d rather get books about the Red Sox out from the library than books about bugs these days :wink:

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Not for macros. I do have 2x and 3x telephoto attachments. Even those can be used in macro mode, permitting much closer focussing with those attachments.

I want one.

Good luck. They haven’t been sold in the US for at least a year. I don’t think they’re being manufactured at all now, and Nikon hasn’t come up with a replacement. I’m not sure what I’ll do if mine ever dies.

Most of the high-end “prosumer” Nikons can do a great job, though. Take a look at these [[u]photos of a dragonfly laying eggs[/u] on the DPReview Nikon Talk Forum.

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i repeat, i really don’t like bugs, but spiders are very cool indeed.
spiderman always was my fav. superhero. :slight_smile:

20

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:
Very funny story.

When I was stationed at Ft. Hood, TX, other than language and interrogation training, we mostly did maintanence work. I painted rocks, dayroom furniture, swamp coolers, doors, etc. There was also a power mower that was pretty much assigned full-time to me and me alone.

One day I was digging weeds in a flower bed next to an old wooden building when I noticed a large wolf carcass spider in a web among some lily leaves. My first thought was “What kind of spider would have caught and killed a bit wolf spider like that?”

So, I grabbed a long piece of grass and tapped the web with it. Then this huge black widow came charging out from under the edge of a board. I almost fell over. It came down so fast, and with such apparent self confidence, that it felt like being charged by a large wild animal of some kind. Then I recovered my cool and cut it in half with my pruning shears.

Also at Ft. Hood, one day I opened a paint shed, and the inner door frame was filled by a pretty neat web, with a black widow right in the center of it.

Ft. Hood was a great place for scorpions, too. We were always finding them under rocks, and my house seemed to be full of them. That’s where I got into the habit of doing a really good job of shaking out my boots before putting them on.

California’s a good place for black widows, too. We had them in our garage, and even in some old, unused trash cans in the back yard. During my first time at DLI, before my Chinese class started, I spent a lot of time on a landscaping detail. Another guy and I were digging up ice plant to transplant, and we hit a bunch of black widows. We went over to the NCO in charge of the detail and said we wanted to go back to the barracks for our gloves, and he said that we couldn’t, because there were no black widows in California. So, we had to take him over and show him. Then everyone was sent off to fetch their gloves.

Once while living in Ft. Ord, I had a big recliner chair, and as I was walking toward it one evening, I saw a black widow come strolling out from under it. I turn the chair upside down and, although I didn’t find any other spiders under it, I sprayed all around inside it with Raid. It stunk for months.

Black widows are about the most impressive spiders I’ve ever seen. The legs look like they’ve been carved out of black steel. The brown recluse is similar, but it doesn’t seem to have that confident attitude that the black widow shows.