Jumping Spider
Jeremiah has gotten totally out of control with the whole “sending awesome pictures to InsectPOD” thing. This is a rather decent picture of a jumping spider. I include it here in part because the picture is good, but also because the story behind it is my favorite spider story so far this year.
I’ll Jeremiah tell it in his own words:
I was taking pictures of a spider… Said spider was awesome, and VERY reactive to me. (Unfortunately, most of its reaction shots were too out of focus to send on.) It fell off the roof where I was taking pictures of it, onto the ground, where I snapped that picture. I got up on it, the flash flashed, and suddenly it came at me.
Through the viewscreen I saw it lunge, super fast, moving for blood. The flash had scared it, angered it, something, and it decided to kill.
It went right for my camera lens.
Me, the brave soul I am, instead of throwing my camera wildly and damaging it in the process, as I would have done only a year ago, I set it down gently, and the spider jumped off. While setting it down, I had the presence of mind to take a picture, because it’s funny.
Okay, first of all? BEST STORY EVER.
Second of all, here’s the panic photo itself:
And third of all, here’s what happened: the jumping spider saw itself reflected in the lens. A jumping spider, very near by, quite a bit smaller than itself. The perfect snack-sized prey!
Jeremiah, thank you. I’m glad you’re getting out and gettin’ dangerous with the fauna of your neighborhood!
MacNut said,
May 23, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
I’m chuckling now thinking of the spider’s reaction when it hit the camera lens:
“Hey WTF is this? And where’d my snack go?? Darnit, prey’s gettin’ harder and harder to catch these days….”
b13 said,
May 23, 2008 @ 8:20 pm
Awesome shot Jeremiah and great sory. These ittle jumpers get defensive REALLY fast. Check out my post from Thursday
I think you will thouroughly enjoy the shots 
JFargo said,
May 24, 2008 @ 2:19 pm
MacNut, if I had reacted how I wanted to when I saw it jump onto the camera, its thoughts would have gone something like this: “Wheee! I’m flying!”
Then the camera probably would have hit a tree.
D'Glenn said,
June 12, 2008 @ 9:17 am
I was referred here because I recently blogged about trying to photograph a jumping spider and complained that jumping onto the camera was cheating. It had not occurred to me that it might have been leaping at its reflection. Then again, both times it did it, it wound up on the barrel of the lens, not on the front element.
The first time, the impression I got was that it had just teleported out of the frame; figuring that wasn’t really likely, I started looking on the floor (it had been on a doorframe) and was lucky enough to catch sight of it clinging to the side of the lens as my eyes swept floorward. The second time I guessed where it had gone and thus found it more quickly.
Then I found out how difficult it is for somebody not already a spider expert to use Google to identify a spider! (For the whole first day I searched, the only spiders I found online that were the right shape were also an order of magnitute larger than the one in my bedroom. I finally found a picture described as “probably genus Metacyrba” that looked similar and was the right size.) Or perhaps my Google-fu is merely weak. (I was looking for a dichotomous key that started with gross, obvious to casual non-expert viewers, features instead of starting with how the mouth moved.)
The spider appeared to be at least as annoyed by the flash as it was by the proximity of the lens (my working distance was a few centimeters with a 1:1 macro lens). I’m not used to photographing macro subjects so eager to get away, nor so agile. Shooting vegetation is much easier. Especially without a ring-flash.
But as a side effect, I’ve learned more about jumping spiders lately, and education is always a good thing.
My poor-quality photos before the wee beastie made good its escape:
complaining blog post — http://dglenn.livejournal.com/1146944.html
next day — http://www.kempt.net/~glenn/photos/Spider20080609.jpg
(It’s two to four millimeters across in its usual standing pose.)
And somebody else’s photo of a similar spider (though the frontmost legs are different): http://bugguide.net/node/view/61552
Insect Picture of the Day » Giant Water Bug said,
July 10, 2008 @ 7:22 am
[…] interested in me and my camera. I didn’t have the flash on, but I’m wondering if she saw a reflection of herself in the camera, because she kept coming closer and closer, until she was right up against […]