The Gold Bug
I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving in those countries¹ that celebrate it. For your post-gorging consumption, today’s installment of Spider Friday has a whole pile of images for you!
Last Saturday I was sitting at the kitchen table when a twitch of motion on the sliding door caught my eye. Having spent a few months watching and photographing bugs now, I instantly knew it was a tiny jumping spider. I grabbed my camera and leaned in for a closer look. This fine lady spider is a jumping spider, but I have no clue as to her species. She was a dull brown and at first I thought she was perhaps a juvenile Platycryptus undatus, as she was only a few millimeters long. It was only in reviewing these pictures that I noticed the bold white stripe across her face and abdomen, probably indicating adulthood; jumping spiders use color for species and sexual recognition and so their exoskeletons don’t become highly chromatose² until they fully mature.
As I circled around her to get a closeup, she sauntered out onto the kitchen floor… and into a shaft of sunlight… and this happened:
Holy cow! Look at that! She’s all metallic! Then she stepped out of the light and became dull brown again. I immediately set about trying to get her into the sunlight again, even picking her up at one point:
See how tiny she is? I never did get a better picture than that first flare, but I did get her onto some 4mm graph paper, so you can see that she’s about 4.5mm long:
What a gorgeous and amazing spider. I hope she overwinters well and makes lots of beautiful spider babies for my house next Spring!
¹ I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong: “those country” is grammatically incorrect.
² This is an inside joke between me and SamWibatt. It’s not really a word.³
³ But if it was, it would mean “This, the thing in reference to which I am using this word, is composed of excessively saturated and contrasting colors, while I, the person who am saying this word at you, am a pompous dork.”
Slowly getting the site back onto an even keel. It's nice to get back into the old posting rhythm.
Brook said,
November 24, 2007 @ 1:51 am
Cool! Can we have a nice big version of the metallic photo?
galen said,
November 24, 2007 @ 5:16 am
Well, chromatose should be a word.
It certainly describes a common action among living entities.
Thank you for introducing a good word that will undoubtedly become more common as the rest of us honor your creativity by using it!
Athena said,
November 24, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
I think that if ginormous can be accepted into the current dictionaries (according to Reader’s Digest, it got added this year) then so can ‘chromatose’. heehee
In any case… The spider is cool, but kinda freaky at the same time! So weird! Pretty anyway!
linda said,
November 25, 2007 @ 2:37 pm
Check your grammar on ” I, the person who am saying this word at you, am a pompous dork.” The person is second person singular, and should take ‘is’ as a verb, shouldn’t it? Am a pompous dork is right, unless you’re not really all that pompous.
David Brady said,
November 26, 2007 @ 10:26 am
Brook: You bet, I’ll try to get one up tonight.
Linda: Oh, I checked it before I submitted it.
And yes, it’s wrong, at least in the Strunk & White sense. That particular usage has currency linguistically, but in this case it is an extension of the original joke, that of the speaker being a pompous dork and speaking incorrectly. This is unfortunately an extension of the inside joke between SamWibatt and I. The original person to use the term chromatose shall remain nameless to protect her identity. I couldn’t figure out how to work “My daughter speaks very well grammar” into the footnote and not have it be an obvious joke. 