Over at Compound Eye I’ve posted photos of a remarkable Australian ant-mimic spider: An Enemy in the Ranks
Posts Tagged ‘spiders’
Orb-weaving spiders have an ant problem
One measure of a predator’s ecological significance is the abundance of strategies prey adopt to avoid being eaten. And how ecologically significant are ants? They are enough of a problem to web-building spiders that the arachnids impregnate their webs with ant-deterring 2-pyrrolidinone: …ants are rarely reported foraging on the webs of orb-weaving spiders, despite the [...]
Face of the Brown Recluse
Among the more interesting animals to appear at the BugShot photography workshop was a Loxosceles reclusa caught wandering about the basement of the assembly building. I had never seen one before. Most of us are taught to recognize the famously venomous recluse by a violin-shaped pattern on the spider’s back. But other species, including some common wolf [...]
Social Spiders
Sometimes I’m glad not to be a grasshopper: Nothing freaks out the arachnophobe in me more than social spiders. One of the more common arachnids in tropical forests, these spiders spin communal webs with hundreds or thousands of individuals. photo details: Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro lens Canon EOS 7D (top) ISO 400 f/11 1/250 [...]
Sunday Night Movie: The Redback Spider
Another classic from the BBC’s Life in the Undergrowth:
And now, some arachnids
Arachnids (you know, spiders and mites and things) never had much of a presence in my photo galleries. While I could chalk their absence up to an obsessive focus on formicids, the reality is that I’m mildly arachnophobic. Photographing spiders makes me squirm, so I don’t do it very often. Oddly, it really is just [...]
Location, location, location
This young black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) set up shop above the nest entrance of a colony of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, allowing the spider nearly unlimited pickings as the ants come and go. The spider’s mottled coloration is typical of young widows; they don’t acquire the striking black and red warning garb [...]
Spider 1, Bird 0
Take that, vertebrate scum! Incidentally, my wife used to have one of these Nephila spiders nesting in the high ceiling of her living room when she was living in Queensland. I guess she used it to dissuade potential suitors, but somehow I made it through.
Here's a new excuse…
My lovely wife Jo-anne has been in South America the last couple weeks doing field research on Argentine ants while I tend the home fires here in Tucson. I hope she finds it in her to forgive me for the post I am about to write. Earlier today I got an email explaining why I’m [...]
Giant Silk Spider
Nephila sp. Giant Silk Spider Panama details: Canon 100mm macro lens on a Canon 20D f/2.8, 1/200 sec, ISO 400 handheld, natural light levels adjusted in Photoshop
A personal blog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
