![]() ![]() This makes her pretty unobtrusive, so it is all the more likely that her prey will bumble into the web without noticing anything amiss until it is Far Too Late. Here the spider is backlit, so we can see that she is not only pale, but the legs and cephalothorax are practically transparent. So far, the best approach I’ve come up with is to get the spider hanging on some structure that I can move around, prop it up in a suitable position, then either slide the camera underneath and take pictures from below, or try to come in from the side. She turned out to be only really happy if she was hanging upside down from her cobwebs, so attempting to flip her over and position her under the camera made her exceedingly unhappy. So, yesterday I finally got around to catching another one to try again. ![]() Then, when I went back to try again, it had moved on. I had to hand-hold the camera in bad light, and it came out kind of blurry. The picture above was taken of a spider behind a cabinet in the kitchen back in May, and the light was awful (I had to brighten up the image a lot with ImageJ, which threw the color off a bit). Getting good pictures of the spiders is proving to be a bit of a problem for me, because they tend to hang out in dark corners, and are kind of fragile, which makes it hard to catch them and get them into decent light. They spin the classic “cobweb” type of web, a loose, 3-dimensional structure that is practically invisible until the spider dies or otherwise abandons them, at which point they get all covered with dust and become easy to see. So, when a kid wakes up with some sort of “bites”, and the worried parent looks around the bed and finds a bunch of these hanging around, they are likely to get blamed for it, but honest, they didn’t do it (and, in fact, are quite likely to be catching and eating the fleas, bedbugs, or mosquitos that did do it). They are perfectly harmless, of course, but a lot of people get antsy about them because they are the sorts of spiders you are likely to find building webs under the bed. These in particular are probably Pholcus phalangioides, which is another of those cosmopolitan species that humans have carried all over the world. They are “cellar spiders”, in the family Pholcidae. These spiders tend to hang out in corners in our basement, just like everybody else’s basement. ![]()
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