Spiders are never as scary as people think.
Wolf spider, the frontispiece from Keith
McKeown’s Australian Spiders.
I got interested in spiders in 1958 when I read Keith
McKeown’s Australian Spiders. The
frontispiece (above) showed a spider, face-on. I took one look and saw a
resemblance to my Latin teacher. Any life form that could mimic Latin teachers
had to be special, I decided.
I have been a fan of spiders ever
since, and I address pests who come to my door and pushy sales people and
scammers in Latin phrases, to confuse them. It also celebrates my Latin teacher
who, it turns out, was an incredibly good actor.
Redback spiders (left) are scarier than
Latin teachers, so leave them alone. Trapdoor spiders (right) are probably not
too bad, but pictures like these are only safe to take if you have had some
training (or if the spider is dead, like this one.).
A St Andrew’s Cross spider.
If you are Australian the St Andrew’s Cross Spiders are
interesting. They insist on putting a diagonal cross (a saltire) in their web,
and then they put two legs along each line. Why do they do it? The best guess I
have seen is that they do it to make themselves look larger to potential
predators. They are an easy-to-see target, so they make what hunters see look
frightening. Are there similar spiders where you live?
Over the years, I
have come up with some wrinkles to make photographing spiders easier. The
jumping spider below lived up to its name and kept springing away, so I put it
in a glass salad bowl, with blue card in the bottom. Then I just had to wait
until it got tired of leaping.
A jumping spider: there are at least a dozen
species in my small garden.
I used to wonder how orb-weavers avoided getting caught in
their sticky vertical webs, but as the side-shot on the right below shows, the
webs are NOT vertical. The web is blurry because most of it is out of the focal
plane, but you can see the angle.
Why spiders don't stick to their webs.
Later, I decided to try seeing the web better, and started
working with card sheets. As you can see from the first two shots above, not
all cards are equal: the black card made the web much more visible.
Orb weavers’ webs with water on them.
Other tricks that are worth trying include catching webs
with raindrops on them, or using flash in the dark. Note that (aside from a
mild trauma from the flash {maybe}) for the spider, these do no harm to
animals). The two shots on the left have raindrops on them, the others are
different.
Some photographers
use a misting bottle on a web, but on a foggy morning, just as the sun starts
to shine through, you can get shots like these two on the right. (Just as I was
finishing this book, I was watering plants in a nursery where I work as a
volunteer, and I set the hose to ‘mist’, and got some excellent shots of webs
for my next book.)
When spiders moult, you can recover their cast-off
exoskeletons (shells, if you like), and if you have a microscope, or even a
magnifying glass, you can get some amazing shots. On the right, the light is
coming from below this huntsman. It is shining through, giving the eyes an
eerie look.
The ‘face’ of a huntsman spider, and how to
spotlight for spiders after dark.
At night, you can spotlight live spiders and examine them.
Above right, that’s my ever-helpful wife posing with a strong light near her
ear. Walk out in the garden at night, look for glowing eyes in the grass and
then move in on them.
Until the electric
torch was invented, the spiders did well, but shine a light at them, and the
eyes with tapeta (tapetums, if you
like), reflect back a green light. Some spiders that live mainly in dark places
have ‘nocturnal eyes’, which look pearly white. Most spiders have diurnal eyes,
which appear dark, but when you shine a light on them, the reflections are easy
to see.
You need a decent
patch of lawn without too much light, but you can also spotlight spiders on
bushes. You need a bright tight-beam torch, held close to your ear, so you can
look along the beam for the reflections from their eyes.
You can find even
the tiniest spiders this way, though it’s not a good idea to pick unidentified
spiders up by hand! You will need a spotlight torch, and a jar and a card. I
have also located Cape York spiders at night with a ‘Petzl’ head torch: these
use LEDs for light and strap onto the forehead, leaving your hands free. Mind
you, just photographing a spider in its web can also be fun:
Austracantha minax from North Head, Sydney on the left, and
Nephila sp. from the Daintree River
in the centre. There is a story that goes with the right-hand spider.
That third spider is called Backobourkia. I just threw it in here, because the name is
marvellous. If you are Australian, can you see that? Because I have worked with
taxonomists, I think I know how it got its name, but I found it on Sydney’s
North Head (where I work), not at the
Back of Bourke.
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