Ants Forage A Dead Bee - Click to view details

This was a very skittish, clumsy spider. It appears to have a difficult time carrying its large bulbous abdomen. It also cannot grip plastic as well as other spiders I have captured. Similar to other orbweaver spiders, it plays dead when first approached. It actually fell out of its web when I attempted to capture it.

This ended up being a difficult spider to photograph, and not just because of its size. I recently built a light tent that isn’t really bright enough to allow for low aperature/high speed shots. In fact, I had better success photographing this spider while it was out of the tent using my flash ring.

Make sure to scroll to the bottom to get an idea of the size of this spider.

The name “widow spiders” came from the belief that the female usually killed and ate the male after mating. It is now known, however, that this practice of “husband killing” was an artifact of the conditions under which observations were made. In early behavioral studies, the male widow spiders were kept in small containers with the females and they could not leave after mating. The usual result was that at some point, the female would mistake the male for prey and he would be eaten. Subsequent studies, both in the laboratory and the field, have shown the female eating the male rarely occurs so long as he is able to leave her web after mating. Interestingly, there is one spider in the same group as the American widow spiders, the Australian redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti), where the female actually begins eating the male as part of the mating ritual. However, this is a unique example among the spiders.

[Source: Virginia Tech Department of Entomology]

So on Thursday, September 18th, a two friends and I headed to downtown Los Angeles. I was hoping for a larger turn out, but with just three of us, it allowed us to get around much faster than if we had more people. In fact, for SULAII, we had just enough time to explore a few streets in Pasadena and Chinatown. But the amount of terrain covered is not the point of SULA - it’s seeing the world through the perspective of other Angelino photographers, which hopefully leads to creativity and growth.

To see the other photos, check out my SULA flickr group. Here are a few of my photos:

I was in OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware) getting a spray bottle and some ground soil. While waiting for assistance out in their garden center, I spotted a small spider in a spiral orb web - the one most people think of when they imagine a spider web. Empty spray bottle in hand, I wrangled the spider into it and took it home for closer inspection.

I’m having difficulty identifying it so for now I’ll just call it the “OSH spider”. I’ll release it outside my apartment when I’m done. I’m not sure OSH will want it back.

[EDIT] - I think I have identified it as a labyrinth orbweaver - (Metepeira labyrinthea)

When I got home, he wasn’t as dead as I thought. He was crawling around making himself at home in the vial.

I attempted a few dozen photos Tuesday evening, but the vial glass made the shots all slightly blurry.  I moved him into a larger vial and added some leaves and a few ants - making him comfortable as I tried to figure out how to photograph the tiny guy.  Wednesday night I noticed he made a small web within the vial and opened it to see if I could photograph him sitting in it.  However, I forgot that non-dead spiders have a tenancy to move around a lot.  None of the photos came out.

Last night, however, I got lucky.  After opening the vial, he moved around for a bit, but settled down after a few minutes in a newly-formed web spread over the opening of the vial.  I snapped just enough pics to work with.

Following the instructions of one of my favorite insect photographers, Brian Valentine, I ran the photos through a shareware program called CombineZM.  Here’s the results of two stacked images:

The spider’s scientific name is Zygiella x-notata, but it appears not to have a common name. My guidebooks state that the male can grow to be about 5mm in length, a few millimeters shorter than the female. I don’t know enough about spider anatomy to know which gender it is, but I’ll just continue to call it a male.

I would like put in this name for approval: The Alien Head Spider. Really take a look at the spider’s abdomen. Can you see the alien head?? Here’s the alien from the film Independence Day for comparison:

I plan on returning him to the arboretum and his tree this weekend. I’m sure the mother ship has been looking for him.

We were walking down North Main Street just west of Olivera Street when I spotted the venemous spider. The street and sidewalk was not very well lit, so it surprised me that I spotted the black arachnid chilling in a corner.  I set up the tripod and tried to manually focus, but the angle was too strong for my cheap tripod to handle and my camera slowly bowed down.

Photo copyright R. Beltran

To solve the problem, I blew gently on the spider, causing it to head up her web about a foot, stopping at the perfect height for my camera! (see above)

I snapped a few shots as my friends helped light the spider with their camera’s flashes, but the shots came out over-exposed. I decided to switch from my Canon EF24-70 f2.8 L lens (pictured) to my Canon 100mm Macro F2.8 USM lens. Focusing was even more difficult, but after a few shots, I finally got what I was looking to get:

Tonight’s star was a strawberry root weevil (Otiorhynchus cribricollis), whom was calm enough to sit and pose for me for a while.  I tried a few settings on my ring flash (as well as tried using just the ambient light) and in the end, I got this shot by holding the ring flash in front of the weevil.

White

Blue

I was at my local bookstore looking for a book on insect macro photography when I passed behind a man flipping through a book. Sounds like something that happens all the time in a bookstore, right? But this was the first time I passed someone where, in a blink of an eye, I had the desire to immediately purchase the book they were perusing.

I started a conversation with the man who, wouldn’t you know it, has a name. He goes by Thom Bluemel and he’s the brilliant creator of Bird Brains.

The book he was reading is called Animal Life: Secrets of the Animal World Revealed by Dr. Charlotte Uhlenbroek. Unlike other hefty encyclopedic tomes on animals, this one specifically covers animal behavior. But this was not what drew me to the book over a Thom’s shoulder. The 5.8 pound book is sweet, sweet eye-candy. Produced in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History and Doris Kindersley Publishing, every one of its 512 pages is visually stunning - both in design and in photography.

I’ll end my first look with photos I took of the spreads. The book retails for $50, but you should be able to find it for sale at about $35. Either way, it’s worth every penny.

Ok, no more pics. Now get up from your computer, go to a bookstore, and get this incredible book now!