Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning


July 9, 2008:Life is good: Miagrammopes, Nephila pilipes and Argyrodes flavescens

Yesterday was a so-so day at work - more admin headaches than investigative fun - so I took off at 3pm, and went to Queenstown Secondary School - 500 meters from our flat for a bit of spider action. Wow was it fun. The same Nephila pilipes was busy waiting for prey - while 3 male Nephila were fighting among themselves and thinking about mating. The fun part was with the Argyrodes flavescens - both male and female and there was a bit of mating action going on there also. Difficult to capture with still images - but got a few photos of the fighting. Then Miagrammopes wiggled as I was leaving and identified her location. So got some excellent shots of her rebuilding her single strand web (after I disconnected one end). Her behavior is quite predictable and my experiments are getting more and more consistent. Captions later

This lynx climbed onto my little yellow towel laying on the grass. Maybe next time I'll try this again as this is the first time I've found one of these guys.

jul 09 0371 lynx

I moved and she moved

jul 09 0380 lynx towel top

Then she moved again. Being only 5 - 10 cm above the grass, impossible to get a head-on view. But I shall take my yellow towel and see if this works again. The rain was less so I moved to the Nephila spot

jul 09 0384 lynx towel

It was raining slightly - here is our lady with a small rain drop on her left palp

jul 09 0363 nephila pilipes

Later - an edge view shooting across her web - the male on one side and the female on the other side.

jul 09 0563 male web female

Up close and personal

jul 09 0638 cephalo thorax eyes

Here is one of the males behind the female

jul 09 0498 male female web dorsal

A male Nephila pilipes

jul 09 0579 male nephila

Here is a photo of a male with the embolic conductors clearly visible projecting from the top (in this photo) of each palp.

jul 09 0549 embolis injector male nephila

Two male Nephila pilipes tend to fight for access to the female. I had not seen this before and could not get enough depth of field to accurately capture the action. Here the top one is in the focal plane.

jul 09 0478 2 nephila males

Sort of a brushoff. What happened was that one male approached the other, then flexed his legs to successively elevate and lower his abdomen - probably some sort of signal that something is going to happen. Then there is a touch and then a brief encounter (of the 2nd kind) and one makes a hasty retreat

jul 09 0483 brushoff

The main event Argyrodes flavescens

In this Nephila web, there are at least 1 male and 2 female Argyrodes flavescens. There is a mating game in progress. One appears to play where one (I think the female) wraps her legs around herself and appears as a small dinner (see below photo) fragment caught by the host Nephila pilipes

jul 09 0535 hiding

A male Argyrodes flavescens approaches with one palp extended

jul 09 0473 argyrodes palp

On the move and extruding silk

jul 09 0476 argyrodes move

Male approaching

jul 09 0585 argyrodes approach

Mating action (?)

jul 09 0588 argyrodes mating

which continues for maybe half a minute

jul 09 0590 argyrodes mating

And on it goes

jul 09 0465 argyrodes fight mate

This guy looks like he is just swinging by 2 strands

jul 09 0468 male swinging

Extruding tiny silk

jul 09 0537 male extruding

Good view of her eyes

jul 09 0553 argyrodes eyes 1 strand

Spanning Nephila silk and his (or maybe her) silk

jul 09 0555 male argyrodes thin thick strands

WIth palps extended - ready for action

jul 09 0558 male argyrodes

Extruding silk

jul 09 0559 argyrodes extruding

The male doing something - with his palps in the retracted position

jul 09 0561 male argyrodes

Extruding silk and climbing her own strand

jul 09 0577 extruding

Female climbing

jul 09 0600 female argyrodes

Female extruding

jul 09 0602 female argyrodes

Female doing something

jul 09 0608 female argyrodes

Male with palps extended. A matrix of Nephila and Argyrodes silk

jul 09 0634 argyrodes

Miagrammopes

Walking back home, I passed a group of leaves and something wiggled. I knew immediately that probably it was a stick spider, Miagrammopes. Here she is in her stick configuration.

I had some success early with initiating some web management behaior. After waiting for perhaps 10 min and nothing, I detached the far end (right) of her single strand. Look carefly to the left of her 1st legs and you'll see the tangle ball of silk, the excess accumulated by making the strand tight.

jul 09 0655 miagrammopes stick

Immediately she dropped to a vertical position with the loose end of silk flying through the breeze

jul 09 0659 single floatng strand

As the loose end floated about, it temporarily attached to something to the right and she started withdrawing excess silk. You can see the tangle ball of silk held by her 2nd legs and the bind in her first legs

jul 09 0681 silk ball tensioning

The strand detached itself and reattached to something on the left of the image. Here she is agressively tensioning the strand

jul 09 0684 tensioning

The progress in tensioning can be measured by the piece of debris to the left of her leg (compare with the above photo)

jul 09 0686 juggling

More tensioning

jul 09 0688 tensioning

Here the piece of debris is adjacent to her 1st leg

jul 09 0691 strand splicing

As the tension increases - her orientation changes. Here she is in a more curved configuration

jul 09 0700 magrammopes tensioning curved

With the strand almost completely tensioned, you can see a strand between her 1st legs and 2nd legs

jul 09 0703 miagrammopes tensioning

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

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