Crab Spider Spinaretts

[Walter Piorkowski]

Canon 10D
.7 inch f.l. lens at f/4
stacked images at .001 inch increments
Combine Z, Photoshop

These belong to the little crab spider in my earlier post. I am sure that others have photographed these. I would be interested in seeing their posts.
Walt

[Bruce Williams]

Very interesting macro image as was your previous posting.

Excellent work.

Bruce

[beetleman]

I don`t know Walter. I cannot recall seeing any in this forum. All I can say is "WOW"

[Ken Ramos]

Talk about being so close as to not see that it is an elephant! What a butt shot!

[Walter Piorkowski]

Thank you Bruce and Doug for your interest and kind words. I wish the final composite was as sharp as the originals that made it up. And Ken, better a butt shot of this tiny fellow than being this close to an elephants rear end!

Walt

[rjlittlefield]

Walt,

A collection of disparate thoughts...

1. I believe you're the first to post images of spinnerets. I don't remember any others, and I couldn't find any by searching both the old and new forums under several different spellings. ("Spinneret" is the official one.) Maybe you can start a new trend.

2. This is great magnification you're getting -- a scale bar would help us to interpret.

3. The lighting looks like it's coming from fairly "small" sources (narrow angle). That's not always the best for shiny surfaces. Have you tried Charlie's ping-pong ball diffuser trick?

4. I'm intrigued by your comment about the composite not being as sharp as the originals. Can you post an original to show us what you mean? Sometimes the interpolation associated with registering the images (aligning them) can eat into your sharpness. That mostly happens when you're cropping to almost actual pixels. What's the cropping of these images -- are these actual pixels cropped from a much larger frame, or are these full frame resized to 800 pixels, or something in between?

--Rik

[Walter Piorkowski]

Hi Rik. Gee, I have never been first at anything before, nice feeling. I will try putting scale bars in future images but for this one the width of the field is 2mm. I did deviate from my normal diffuser technique and apply direct fiber optic illumination to this subject. I did the same with the spider’s facial portrait. I felt that it helped, but I guess not. I will get up a single image as soon as I can but for your knowledge the image is not cropped and is a full frame JPEG that was resized too 800 pixels. I deliberately kept the compression as close to 200 K as possible as to not loose too much shadow detail. I would also like to get a shot in on the macro stage for this project but have been very busy. Thanks

Walt

[DaveW]

Do crab spiders use webs Walter or are these just rudimentary spinnerets? I wonder if they do lower themselves to the floor by a silk line though. I only ask as I thought they ambushed their prey rather than ensnared them, so whether they still produced silk with their spinnerets?

DaveW

[Walter Piorkowski]

Hello Dave. You are correct at least from my personal study that these spiders do not produce a web and ambush their prey as you say similar to jumping spiders. To be honest I have never disturbed one as it sat on a leaf for example to see if it set out a silk line in its escape.

One of the reasons I was interested in the post others may have done was because of and old childhood book that had line drawins of the spinaretts of various spiders and they were differant. I would like next to image an orb web weaver to see this differance first hand on a spider designed by nature to produce a web.

Walt