On Monday, I was watering the plants and found something that compelled me to get the camera, because she was surprisingly vivid – I was going to say, “unnaturally,” but that’s plainly wrong, I think. Anyway…
I thought first from the blonde thatch that this was a green lynx spider, but soon corrected myself – it’s our old friend the magnolia green jumping spider (Lyssomanes viridis,) sporting a rather distinctive and nuclear-hued babies bump. I’ve never spotted one in this state, and it was making me hungry for jellybeans.
Unfortunately, my good macro lens is being repaired right now, so I had to resort to the 18-135 for these shots – adequate, but not ideal. It was breezy, she was as fidgety as jumping spiders always are, and I had nothing to brace against, so when she started showing that ‘wandering eyes’ trait, I didn’t get any decent frames of it – instead I’ll refer you here for some cool video of it. Meanwhile, she wasn’t enamored of the attention and kept slipping to the underside of the leaf, whereupon I’d flush her back to the top side again for a few moments and get another frame. Eventually, I let her be – it’s not good for expecting mothers to get too stressed, you know.
A day later, I was poking around at night and thought to check and see if she did what was expected, and began shining my pocket flashlight up from the underside of the leaves. Indeed, she hadn’t even left the one I’d found her on.
There she is with her new brood nest of eggs, which is typical of the species – they actually spend most of their time on the undersides of leaves, which is fine, because that’s where their prey (like mosquitos) tend to settle in. But no, I couldn’t let it go at that, so down on the ground on my back I went to shoot upwards at the underside of the leaf. I was using the reversed 28-105 this time, but the trumpet flower proved to be too high for this and I really cannot do a partial-crunch while tilting my head backwards and trying to focus at the same time. I know, I call myself a nature photographer…
Regardless, I simply tipped the pot over a bit so I was shooting at a more amenable angle, a maneuver that probably would have sent her scurrying off had it not been for her protective instincts over the eggs.
She looks a little more trim now, doesn’t she? I had the opportunity to watch this take place, do some video even, but she might never have done it in my presence, and it might have taken ages, and I had other things to do as well as still getting over this weird illness. This is what you get, so there.
The headlamp that I was using has a blue LED mode that actually intrudes into the UV spectrum a little, which has helped me find some fluorescing subjects, but my suspicions were incorrect: despite the dayglo appearance, neither the eggs nor the mother fluoresce in ultra-violet. Ah well, I tried.
And while I was out there, I went a short distance away to the backyard pond, because there was a subject there I’d been meaning to tackle and now that I had the macro rig out, it was time.
This is a six-spotted fishing spider (Dolomedes triton,) a smaller one at about 4cm in leg spread. Which nevertheless was many times larger than the magnolia green above, which probably topped out at 12-14mm in body length, the eggs a mere millimeter across – I’ll try to get some specific measurements, but I know she’ll be running interference. Anyway, I have a couple of subjects to keep my eye on, on top of the routine collection of course. We’ll see what happens.