While looking up details for an earlier post I came across a curious trait of this particular species of assassin bug, and decided I’d like to try and get shots of it in action. I have been too lucky lately, and thought this luck might hold, but alas…
Pale green assassin bugs (Zelus luridus,) seen in several recent posts, are spindly little insects usually measuring less than 20mm in body length as adults, so roughly twice as long as a housefly, and on first glance they might give the impression of being spiders. You’d have to look really closely to see that their legs, especially their forelegs, are covered with short hairs, and even closer to find that they glisten. This glistening is due to a secretion of the bug, and is apparently sticky to some degree; my source of this information likened it to the stalks of a sundew plant, seen below, which snares arthropod victims to digest as a source of food.
A closer look at the insect’s leg is seen at right – this is one that I captured and kept in the same terrarium with the magnolia green jumping spiders until I could arrange some particular photos. It would have been nice to get video of one capturing its food, but extremely difficult; being there at just the right moment, with adequate lighting and the camera focused, while the assassin snagged some prey in unobscured view, would be demanding to say the least. In fact, despite finding this species all over the place for the past several years, I think I’ve seen it with prey maybe twice – one of those is seen here.
Even while provided with a variety of food insects in an enclosed area, I never saw the assassin with a capture at all, so I did these detail shots yesterday and then released it. Now, this was a nice set of controlled conditions, with a captive subject that was never more than 15cm from a food source (usually quite a selection of them) – imagine doing something like stalking one of these in ‘the wild’ and hoping to snag action shots as it successfully captured its prey. I imagine it’s an activity for those who find watching paint dry to be too hectic…
In contrast, the magnolia green jumping spiders (Lyssomanes viridis) have been surprisingly easy to work with, even while possessing the typical jumping spider behavior of wandering around frequently. I’ve learned that this species is a little more sedate, tending to lie in wait and ambush prey that comes close, but I’ve seen several captures, including as I sat and waited for the assassin to partake of the same collection of food insects that I most recently introduced into the terrarium. Even more interestingly, I’ve spotted them with prey in the yard twice recently, one of those just yesterday before I even got the assassin shots above.
The gardenia bushes, planted just last year as we moved in, have proven to be a favorite for several spider species, but the magnolia jumpers really like hanging out on the undersides of the leaves, and that’s where I spotted and photographed this one. This image is actually inverted; I shot it upside-down looking up at the underside of the leaf, which explains all the debris on the leaf, since this one was close enough to the ground to catch all the splatter from the rain (there’s no grass in that area at all, just bare ground.) The shooting position was so awkward I didn’t even realize the spider had prey until I unloaded the memory card.
And, upon writing this, I realized I hadn’t gotten one of the shots I’ve been thinking of for weeks, and (yes, late at night) decided to see if I could snag a quick one while I was on-topic. It’s raining out, so you can see my (pointless and possibly psychotic) dedication to the blog. The subject seen above was still in place, but that debris messed with my plans too much, so I found another after a brief search, this one on the struggling remnants of The Girlfriend’s lilies (same one seen here.)
This is actually the easiest way to find the littler buggers: shine a flashlight up at the underside of the leaves. It’s best at night of course, but still works during the day, and this one was done with my headlamp propped up underneath the plant, allowing me a decent shutter speed that wouldn’t even have required the tripod – since I was only shooting a shadow, depth wasn’t needed and f4 was adequate to pull off 1/100 second at ISO 200. I had to time it between the vibrations of the raindrops, though.
The jumpers have been a lot more cooperative than the assassins (there’s a sentence that desperately needs its context,) so we’ll continue with them. During one session, the spider turned away from me and ruined my chance at getting those googly eyes in motion, but presented another opportunity: seeing the eyes from the side, through the exoskeleton.
Don’t ask me what purpose that strawberry-blonde haircut serves, but beneath it, we can see a tan and a dark patch joined; these are actually the eye of the spider, which moves internally and isn’t always visible from this vantage. I’m going to rashly assume that the spider (or this eye, anyway) is looking up and to the left, pressing its eye against the side of the cephalothorax right in front of us. Yes, I know this is a weird thing to see; you don’t come here for latté and kittycats.
And one last one, because.
As threatening as this looks, it’s not anything even remotely aggressive, but simply the spider moving those fangs out of the way to clean a leg in its mouth, and I can’t even estimate how small those really are, since the entire spider is about 5mm in body length – safe to say you aren’t likely to feel anything even if it did try to bite. This, by the way, is the first spider species I’ve seen that did not have reddish-brown chelicerae. Even the two centipede species that I’ve gotten detailed shots of had modeled the same color.
But yeah, only six eyes – not every spider has eight.
Today, a recent one, taken a few days back with the 
The radiant is where each of the storms get their names. It is the part of the sky that is facing into the debris that causes a meteor, so the majority will appear to be emanating from that point – in this case, that’s the constellation Leo. One of those bright fireballs, however, appeared close to the horizon and traveled parallel to it, more or less towards the radiant. What’s happening is that meteor storms are bits of junk left in the orbital path of comets, some of the stuff that produces the visible tail as they approach the sun, and each year the Earth encounters this halo of stuff on its own orbit of the sun. The radiant is the point that faces into the wind, as it were, straight off the nose of the Earth – the planet rotates, and with it the sky, but it’s traveling in one particular direction, and in November that’s towards Leo. But as Earth enters this cloud of meteoroids, they may have their own inherent travel directions, not to mention being redirected by the gravitational pull of the planet, so while most of the meteors we might see originate from one direction, they can come from just about anywhere.
When the weather wasn’t bad, I was tied up, and when I had free time, the weather was terrible. Plus, the terrible weather was enough to take the leaves from the trees in most places. Thus, the autumn color season danced away from me this year, but I think it avoided a lot of people, so I’m not going to feel too badly about it.
The family of mantids that I observed in the yard all spring and summer seem to have vanished, but a few of the Carolina mantids (Stagmomantis carolina) are hanging out at the nearby pond. Both were sluggish on my first encounter, since they hadn’t a chance to warm themselves much yet, but they soon became as active as normal. Unfortunately, the wind also started to pick up, swinging the branches about wildly, and focus on the smaller insects (about as long as my thumb) became impossible.
Rains, naturally, bring out the mushrooms. These are part of the first “fairy ring” I’ve ever seen, a nearly-complete circle of mushrooms. But they occurred in mixed lighting and the contrast prevented any decent images of the entire ring, so I went in close for a few dancing with the wild onions that are common in the area, which make the task of mowing the lawn a notably fragrant experience.
And to close, another of the pale green assassins, because I liked how all the elements fitted together, plus it’s a decent scale shot. Often enough, this is exactly how many subjects first appear, and to spot them one has to be able to see the change in pattern, the unexpected element that signifies something other than the normal botany; for the Carolina mantis on the white flowers above, the only thing I spotted initially was a leg, out of place because no twigs or leaf stems should have been present among the flower blossoms. It’s a good trait to develop, but don’t ask me how to do it or how long it takes – I just realized that I’ve been doing it for a while now. Nor can I even say how good I am at it, because there’s no one going along behind me to tally all the critters that I miss ;-)
We are rapidly approaching ‘peak’ autumn color season here in this section of NC, which is slightly misleading in a couple of ways. First off, peak is different depending on latitude, humidity, and the conditions that the trees were in throughout the summer, so you never have to go very far to find different color conditions. Second, the trees all change at different times and different rates, so each species has its own time for brightest colors, and the best that anyone can aim for (if they’re looking for broad landscapes anyway,) are periods where the greatest number of species visible are closest together in ideal color. Obviously there’s a challenge to this, compounded by the bare fact that a good wind or rain storm near such times can wipe all the leaves from the trees. However, if you’re selective and go for smaller compositions rather than something like an entire hillside, you can shoot ‘peak’ colors for weeks.
Last weekend was even harder, as the colors were sparse and widely separated, so a lot of selectivity and careful framing was in order – even though only two thin trees are producing color here, the angle made the most of them within the frame, and the stump formed the primary point of focus so the colors just kind of fill out the background as the setting. The sky was too clouded to provide any color itself, so the muted light is communicating the grey fall day thing, and you can see that the colors on the ground aren’t anything to write home (or a post) about. However, after getting back and seeing how this frame turned out, I realized I could have changed my angle only slightly and made that cluster of thicker trunks appear almost to ‘sprout’ from the stump, nicely aligned with the sides. I hate it when I get creative after the fact…
Suspended in the middle distance over a significant dropoff, I wasn’t going to get very close to this one, so I settled for capturing its subtle presence against the backdrop of the beginning autumn colors, managing to get a hint of the orb web in the image. Marbled orb weavers (Araneus marmoreus) seem to be conflicted: visible here and in that previous linked shot, they have very high visibility markings with the banded legs and the brilliant body colors, which is nature’s way of saying, “Back off!” without having the evolve little Yosemite Sam mudflaps, but they depend on their webs not being obvious in order to feed at all. To the best of my knowledge, flying insects take no note of their colors nor the curious ability to hover in midair apparently unsupported, and thus blunder into the webs, but the birds which might consider them a (sizable) tasty meal are alerted by the incongruous contrast and position. It’s one of those funny things, because like the 
Now for a bit of trivia. While shooting this, I had the presence of mind not just to try and frame the sun with the arc for comparative purposes, but to note the time of day and the relative positions of both sun (bursting through the trees near the bottom of the image) and arc, because at that time I didn’t even know what a circumzenithal arc was. I could only estimate the altitude of the sun and arc, but figured 30° for the sun and 75-80° for the arc. Later on as I looked up details, I found a source that said that the arc is usually about 46° above the sun. Naturally, I pumped my fist in the air and whooped and did all of those other egotistical guy things (EGTs.) But then, with some playing around with Stellarium and the view-angles I should have been getting from the lens, I ended up with the sun at 20° and the arc at 59° – wasted those whoops, it seems. Though I’m skeptical, because I would swear that the arc was higher. The site that I just linked to, by the way, says that the best times to see such arcs is when the sun is around 22° in altitude, so that lines up, at least…
I finish off with another selective composition, because the tiny sapling venturing from a hole in the tree trunk was interesting enough, more so with the color. It wasn’t much later than this that the humidity built too high and the light conditions descended into heavy haze, dropping the wooded areas into deeper shade and destroying any chances for colorful backlighting. But we got enough frames for the day, I’m thinking.
