Spider Mom

[BillTyler]

This pholcid spider has attached her eggs to the front of her head, and is now waiting for them to hatch. When collected, she had a gigantic abdomen. A day later, she had attached to the top of the improvised container and laid her eggs. The transformation was startling. Rather than disturb her unduly, I cut holes in the sides of the plastic drinking cup she's living in, and photographed through them. I'm now waiting for the babies to hatch.

Canon 5D3, Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens at about 3x magnification.
1/200, f/16, ISO 100
Illuminated by two speedlights in Lumiquest softboxes, one on each side, and a third flash aimed at a large styrofoam block behind the spider. All flashes manually set.

[Nancy Bell]

Fascinating image and natural history! Those eggs on her head are amazing and you captured them well. If the babies hatch successfully, you might consider building some sort of light box to photograph them in where you have control over the bkgd. Don't know if baby spiders suddenly run around like a room full of toddlers or what but I am eager to see what happens next.

[BillTyler]

Thanks Nancy! I don't know how these babies behave, but a while back I had the opportunity of photographing some newly-hatched black widows. Here's what I learned. I had thought that they could be contained by placing the jar where they hatched in a pan of water, making it necessary (I thought) for them to swim to escape. Not a chance. Within a minute or so, they were coming out of the jar, building silk bridges to the edge of the water pan, ballooning (spinning a strand of silk and letting the wind catch it), and generally dispersing rapidly into the environment. Luckily, this was all outdoors. So if I get hatchlings from these eggs, I'm going to be sure to have the photo setup completely in place before letting them out, then working rapidly.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Bill. I like the lighting on the eggs which gives them a 3-dimensional look. As Nancy points out, this interesting image would be much stronger if you had a solid background of white, black, or even green. :S3:

[BillTyler]

Hi Bill. I like the lighting on the eggs which gives them a 3-dimensional look. As Nancy points out, this interesting image would be much stronger if you had a solid background of white, black, or even green. :S3:


Thanks for the comments, Steve. It's hard to do too much with the background because of the container. The spider is hanging from a shiny black plastic coffee-cup lid, and there are clear shiny plastic walls that can't be entirely avoided. Here's a closer look at the egg mass, though, where the background is less intrusive. I'm interested in the somewhat granular appearance that I can see in a few of the eggs. It almost looks like they're filled with bubbles. That annoying diagonal blur on the right is one of the spider's legs. By the way, the entire egg mass is about 3 millimeters across.

Bill

[Jonathan Ashton]

Tricky sho to get I can appreciate the difficulties, for me the original is betwixt between, the latter shows the eggs very well maybe the original at a lower mag would have been a good idea?? But then, I suppose then the background would have been problematical.