{"id":1261,"date":"2010-07-28T13:45:50","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T18:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=1261"},"modified":"2010-08-11T01:49:53","modified_gmt":"2010-08-11T06:49:53","slug":"yes-im-weird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2010\/07\/yes-im-weird\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, I&#8217;m weird"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;but then again, you already knew that, didn&#8217;t you?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/jeweled.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"jeweled\" width=\"400\" height=\"496\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1262\" \/>This little bugger here is, to the best I can determine right now, a spined micrathena spider (<em>Micrathena gracilis<\/em>,) common as muck in the woods of North Carolina, especially this time of year. Yesterday I was walking in the woods and came across a spread of huge mushrooms (one per pizza &#8211; you think I&#8217;m joking?) and this inspired me to go back out at night and try to find some bioluminescent fungi. I&#8217;ve seen it once before, many years ago, and figured this was the time to locate it with the weather we&#8217;ve been having.<\/p>\n<p>I had no luck with that, but in performing my search I wandered through countless spider webs. They&#8217;re most active at night, and micrathenas prefer to spin their orbs (the classic circular &#8220;wheel&#8221; webs) between trees centered about 1.5 meters up. Of course, that&#8217;s just under our own height and we pick the gaps in the trees to navigate through the woods, so encountering them is just about unavoidable. They&#8217;re harmless, of course, but opportunistic.<\/p>\n<p>Near as I can tell, one decided to stay on board when I traipsed through its net, and once I was back in the office and unloading the memory card (two whole shots in extremely dark conditions,) bailed My Body The Bus and set up shop with a web that stretches from my desk lamp, to my monitor, and up to the ceiling fan. Since last night, I&#8217;ve been watching it diddybopping back and forth over my desk on invisible strands. Just now as I was getting this pic, it decided that it might examine the area under the lamp down to my desk, and began dangling down towards the mouse &#8211; I discouraged this by poking it gently to get it to retreat.<\/p>\n<p>Putting something in the photo to show scale was going to be hard, so you&#8217;ll have to settle for a description<strong>:<\/strong> body length without legs is roughly 4mm, maybe half the length of a grain of rice. Its not exactly a tarantula.<\/p>\n<p>Two of my four readers are now asking themselves what kind of brain-damaged human would leave a spider spinning a web directly over their desk, and the answer is, a nature photographer of course. I talked about this before, but when shooting tiny subjects outdoors, your focus range is minuscule, and even gentle breezes can move your subject around. So a subject this difficult that basically <em>asks<\/em> to be photographed is welcomed. Plus my window screens aren&#8217;t as good as I&#8217;d like them and little flying insects like congregating around my monitor at night, so I&#8217;m hoping we can work a deal&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I was thinking of expanding this post with some details about how to get images like this (or even better!) but that will wait a little bit, since I need to do some shots of the macro rig. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;but then again, you already knew that, didn&#8217;t you? This little bugger here is, to the best I can determine right now, a spined micrathena spider (Micrathena gracilis,) common as muck in the woods of North Carolina, especially this time of year. Yesterday I was walking in the woods and came across a spread of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[216,217],"class_list":["post-1261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-micrathena-gracilis","tag-spined-micrathena"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}