At the time, I wrote that the spider was "Photographed live but captive. Therein lies another story, but not tonight..." Well, here's the story...
Yesterday afternoon, I walked past a doorframe in my project room and was surprised to see around shoulder level a boldly figured spider that obviously wasn't a jumper. When I approached to look closer, I was even more surprised to see the critter dive to the floor and take off sprinting. I'm pretty fast, but even so it was all I could do to get a hand in front of it to block its shortest escape route. No problem for the spider, apparently --- it just switched directions and sprinted for different cover. I blocked that route with an arm, then the next with another arm, and so on. This game went on for a frustratingly long time before it finally became apparent that the spider couldn't escape but I couldn't reach a container. Finally I decided to try something desperate, grabbed a nearby garment bag and threw it over the critter. Then I quick-quick fetched a container and pulled back the bag, expecting to see either 1) no spider at all, 2) a smashed spider, or 3) a blur. Sure enough, it was Option #3, the blur, and then the race was on again. Finally I took my best shot at aiming where I thought the critter was going to be, and to my great surprise clapping down the container worked!
OK, one spider nabbed. Now what?
Well, first off, I was curious to know what the beast was. So I transferred it to a clear-walled plastic container, shot a couple of snapshots, and sent them off to my friend Rod Crawford, who curates spiders at the Burke Museum at U.W. in Seattle. Very shortly he wrote back that the beast was "Poecilochroa montana, a.k.a. Sergiolus montanus, male. ... definitely one of our fastest spiders!"
Armed with the ID, I looked up the critter and learned that it's a "ground spider" that normally hunts at night and hides during the day. BugGuide has a few pictures, but I was interested in taking a closer look. The spinnerets were particularly interesting, because they're different from what I'm used to seeing.
But there was a problem: I wanted to keep the critter live but I couldn't get a good picture through the walls of the plastic container that I had it in. That meant (gulp!) that I had to transfer it to something more suitable.
Deciding to just "go for it", I hauled out a large aluminum pan, a chunk of old channel iron, some dirt, some bark, and enough water to make an island suitable for photographing the beast on.
Here's the overview:
That actually worked sort of OK -- it's the setup that produced the gallery photo -- but not at all to my surprise I learned that this spider really doesn't mind swimming.
He's not blindingly fast in the water, and he doesn't do the usual surface tension trick. Instead he just sort of floats along with his legs partly submerged, kind of like a human in a survival suit. Here's a picture:
The technique is not terribly fast, but it's very effective. In fact, if you look closely at the overview photo of the island, you can see the spider sitting on the edge of the pan, apparently contemplating his next move. (I'm thinking he was either getting really tired or partly tame by that point.)
Anyway, that's the story of the spider. I'm posting it here in Technique in hopes that somebody can learn something from my experience.
Oh yes, about those spinnerets... I photographed those this evening, and that turned out to be a bit tricky also. Turns out that the critter is willing to sit still for quite some time, but he doesn't like to be upside down, and I wanted a ventral shot.
Hence we have what I'm now calling an "inverted macroscope":
It consists of an MP-E setup mounted on a geared head tripod, looking up at a small cage containing the subject. More than a bit awkward to use, but it made the subject a lot more tractable. I decided to forego the StackShot for once, and just shot a short stack of a dozen frames by tweaking the MP-E focus ring. Here's the result.
I hope this is helpful or at least amusing.
--Rik
Edit: fix typo
