Astacoidea – Walkabout

The other night I checked out the waste can outside the door to Walkabout Studios, otherwise known as the Magic Bucket of Variety (the can, not the studios,) to find that it had snagged yet another capture. This one was a small-ish wolf spider (Genus Lycosidae) and I noticed as I tipped it out that it looked a little odd. A closer inspection told me why, and once again I got the camera in hand.

This is pretty small, overall length in leg spread less than 30mm, so the fuzzy bits on her abdomen took fairly high magnification to see clearly, in this case the reversed Mamiya 45mm. Yes, they’re her newborns, just two of them, though a closer inspection of the can told me that a lot more of them were scattered around within, so I left it upside-down in the yard and set the few items of trash that had been within alongside it, so they could all escape. The image above is full-frame, though what we find when we crop in close is much better.

Awwwwww! Lookit those huge eyes! They’re like real-life Lucas the Spider!

The credit for this goes to the big round custom softbox, and by chance getting the right angle to reflect from the eyes so distinctly. Most times, the young riding their mother are so thick and oriented for protection, so you mostly see the abdomens and nothing else, but that’s hard to do with just two siblings.

Still, the Magic Bucket was almost responsible for starving an entire family, so I still need to keep checking it routinely. I suppose I could just use a lidded version, but then what would I do for new content?

LATE BREAKING NEWS: I set this aside to post a little later on today, and checked the Magic Bucket in passing:

Yes, another crayfish. I mean, what the hell, man?

Feisty one, too.

Earlier, I thought that perhaps critters were getting caught in the corner between the house and the latticework that sits above the Magic Bucket (see here,) crawling through the lattice and dropping into the can. However, I had a couple of lightweight items sitting on the ledge that runs beside the steps and these had been knocked over, so there’s evidence that this one crawled all the way along that ledge. Still can’t answer why, and I haven’t seen it happen, so it remains a mystery.

I could have saved this one for the weekly topic, but I’m counting on getting something better before then, plus this is just too odd a story not to post immediately.

So, let me paint this picture. Walkabout Studios is a basement office half below grade, meaning my windows look out right at ground level and the outside door is sunk down a few steps. Right outside this door is a small wastebasket, used for the smellier things like the rags soaked in alcohol, UV resin, or acetone from the various projects that I get up to – don’t need those fumes in the studio, I’m weird enough already. Actually, I have a camera, I don’t need to paint a picture:

For reasons yet to be determined, this wastebasket collects a few too many specimens within it, such as the purseweb spider that I featured a month ago, as well as another of the same species a couple weeks later (not discovered until it had passed,) and an odd beetle late last night. I’d put this down to intoxicating fumes from the rags therein, except that they’re far from fresh and the fumes have to be almost nonexistent. I’m now going to have to check daily, it seems, because today I glanced in there and found this:

That, yes, is a crayfish, one that I’m not trying any further identification attempts on because there are 56 different species in North Carolina and it’s not worth the effort. Now, this isn’t too astounding, because the pond is a few dozen meters away. and crayfish (at least some species) do go wandering from their water source from time to time, something that I thought I had a post illustrating but cannot locate, and they can also climb moderately well. Still, why here, and why is this trash can so damn inviting?

[It’s possible that it’s not inviting at all, merely impossible to escape from, so it routinely samples what goes on in the yard perpetually.]

But yes, I did a photo session.

If you know your crayfish species, sing out; I have to say that the coloration and surprisingly small chelicerae (pincers) are not things that I recall seeing before, so it’s potentially a new species for me. Size-wise, however, it was what I expected.

It’s all clean and shiny for these because I gave it a good soak in water from the rain barrel before this session, since I’m a guy. Technically, I could sort these photos into the Arthropods folders, since the crustaceans are part of that Phylum, but I use the Aquatic folder instead – inconsistent or incorrect, perhaps, but I’m the only one that has to find the images, plus I have seven Arthropods folders (limited to about 4,000 images each) and one Aquatic, so…

Prompted by this knowledge (about the Phylum, I mean,) I did a quick check in BugGuide,net, which does indeed have a collection of crayfish photos. None of them are identified in any way though, so no help there. But check out this find – I’m jealous.

Of course I went for the portrait angle, and of course my model here was released back into the pond immediately afterward – perhaps not where it really intended to be, since it had been going walkabout when it got trapped, but it had been out of the water for an unknown period of time and I felt it was best.

So, yeah, we’ll see if this is the oddest thing to show up in the trash can this year…

Tag: Astacoidea

The Magic Bucket doesn’t differentiate

Magic bucket of variety