Today, a few spiders that live in cylindrical webs of their own construction… Exhibit A, the grass spider, although this one’s not in the grass: Exhibit B, an unidentified spider on one of my exterior lights: Creepy! Crawly! Tubular!
Good Monday to you! Here’s a crab spider, perched on a threaded screw that’s part of a baby gate on our porch: A closer look: I like crab spiders. As with jumping spiders, I don’t find them especially heebie-jeebie-inducing.
Found this lovely garden spider while working in the yard on the last day of August… It’s a big beastie; here’s a pencil tip for scale: I induced her to briefly face upward: …but she definitely preferred to be oriented head-down: I then crouched lower, and aimed the camera up, resulting in a different exposure … Read more
I volunteer on Wednesdays at the Fort Valley Public Library. We have some bushes out front, and in the past month, I’ve noticed something about the bush closest to the library door… It’s having some trouble, and the trouble seems to be coming from… (( brace yourself )) … a colony of spiders! You’re seeing … Read more
A few weeks ago, I started seeing a new kind of jumping spider around our house. It was distinctive primarily because of its iridescent green chelicerae (think of them as “jaws”). I took a couple of blurry shots, but nothing I considered good enough for “Monday macrobug” treatment… These spiders reminded me of the unique … Read more
While the Monday Macrobug continues its official winter hiatus, we did have a fuzzy little jumping spider make an appearance in the house the other day: Did you see the @$#%ing ladybug hiding there in the background? Here’s a closer look at the spider: Jumping spiders are my favorite spiders – they seem like little … Read more
Found this fellow in my woodpile: Note the finger tip at lower left for scale. Here’s a close-up. I think it’s a fishing spider:
We’ve got plenty of spiders out here in the Fort Valley. Here’s a look at one common species: a sweet momma grass spider striding along, carrying dozens of infant spiderlings on her abdomen: How many children can you count? A week or so later, I saw another one, with a similar load:
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a “macrobug” photo. So here’s two for you: a harvestman (“daddy longlegs”), and a pelecinid wasp:
It’s that kind of day. Grasshopper? Cricket? Katydid? Some kind of orthopteran, anyhow. Not a full adult, to judge by the lack of well-formed wings. And, here’s a yellow crab spider:
Callan attends a field trip in the Blue Ridge of Virginia, looking first at a Paleozoic shear zone that disrupts (and improves) Mesoproterozoic basement complex rocks.
Camping this weekend; when we took the rain fly off the tent this morning, we found this gruesome scene of a predator and its prey, a miniature drama that played itself out above our heads while we slept: I love macro photography of critters like these… tiny dramas revealed!
On the original version of this blog, I showed off a couple of pseudoscorpions that I found under a rock in Montana. On Tuesday, poking around at pollen-ific Thoroughfare Gap with my Honors student Troy, I found another one. Looked like the same thing. See for yourself. I shot a bunch of macro shots with … Read more
The past couple of days, I’ve been in the field, collecting samples with Dr. Fatim Hankard, a post-doctoral researcher from the University of Michigan, and Matt Domeier, a PhD candidate from that same fine school. We’re interested in using Virginia’s wealth of Catoctin formation feeder dikes to do paleomagnetism measurements that might help us constrain … Read more