Last night, early evening, while I was editing photos of the gulf fritillary seen in my previous post, I was distracted when this orb-weaving spider caught my attention through my office window. I watched her for about 15 minutes before I finally got up to go out and take some pictures in the dwindling daylight. I thought, she's moving kind of slow, this should be easy. It was not. She moved from the upper portion of the drip edge on a lower end of my roof all the way down to the ground. That's about 96". 2.43 meters. And she wasn't moving slow enough for a 300 mm lens with a close-up attachment, nor a 60 mm macro lens. Neither of those options has very good depth of field. Focusing was problematic. I ended up using three lens options in only 5 minutes.
Anyway, Charlotte in the book Charlotte's Web by E.B. White was a "barn spider," specifically an orb-weaver, very specifically an Araneus cavaticus. Her full name was Charlotte A. Cavatica. I suspect my orb-weaver is Neoscona crucifera but there are 3,108 species of orb-weaver spiders in 186 genera worldwide so I'm not going to sweat it on the ID.
Along Came a Spider
Amazing clarity and detail!
ReplyDeleteMuch better photos than I've ever managed to get! The orb spiders are all over the place here and I usually carry a stick in front of me on my first of the day pass through the garden so I don't plant my face into their webs. It doesn't always work...
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