"Dry box" for photographing the hobo spider

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sun Nov 11, 2007 6:37 pm

This setup was for shooting the two stacks (stereo pair) of the hobo spider's epigynum for this posting .

I cribbed this idea from a posting by Don Williams, on the Yahoo Microscope group forum. His is a lot nicer, but this little hack seemed to work OK.

Transferring the specimen from its regular cage into the "dry box" was surprisingly simple. I just chilled the spider in the refrigerator for a few minutes, then used some very long soft forceps to pick up the beast, place it between the microscope slides, and tuck its feet in before taping the slides together.

The white cylinder is a very short piece of PVC irrigation pipe, faced and trimmed to length on a lathe, and glued to one of the slides.

--Rik

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 7:59 pm

Seems that everything but groceries goes into the fridge these days. That is a very simple but highly useful set up there Rik. It would work great with my dissecting scope too I believe, though I think I will stop by Lowes and pick up a pack of variable sized rubber "O" rings. That is not too big of a spider but anyone, like myself, who is arachniphobic will probably argue otherwise.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 8:23 pm

O-rings, now there's an idea.

The PVC pipe actually worked pretty well. It was a bit too large diameter, so I had to heat it up and squeeze it with pliers to make it fit neatly across the slide width.

Now if I could just figure out how to immobilize the little dear so that I could do a good stacked live portrait, that would be cool. I think she'd hold still, if only I could get her posed properly in the first place. Maybe it'll come to me in a couple of days.

--Rik

DaveW · Post by **DaveW** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 1:06 am

I did try a similar idea years ago and made a small wooden glass fronted box where the back could be gradually pushed in to restrict a fly. Trouble was I did not cool the fly in the fridge and could not restrain or restrict it's movement sideways, so it still moved about. This is the problem I see with your set-up. You can restrict the depth but not the width too well.

DaveW