S.E. Asia Photography blog - Nature & Wildlife "Red Legged Golden Orb Weaver Spider"

Hello all steemians and friends. Here, I was a few killometers outside Pai, in northern Thailand, on the Mae Hong Son loop, sitting in the mountains to north of Chaing Mai. The wildlife here is in absolute abundance.

This is one example, one of the Golden Orb Weaver Spiders that go by the name "Nephila", and the closest I've been able to identify this one to, is the Nephila Rufapoda, although that in itself is confusing as it usually makes it's large web high in the canopies of tropical forests, whereas this specimin was found only around two to three meters from the ground.

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The webs that these and other members of the same species produce, is golden and has been collected to make highly elaborate golden silk clothing. 1 million female Golden Orb Weaver Spider's silk was used to make just one cape, and it took 8 years to make. It's also a more durable, high tensile, and elastic silk than almost all synthetic fibers, and is being studied by scientists. It's not the strongest spider's silk though, that belongs to Madagascar's 'Darwin's Bark Spider', whose silk is said to be 10 times stronger than the kevlar used in making bullet proof vests!!

They're also a tasty food too, and when roasted, apparently taste just like pate. I didn't try eating any spiders in SE Asia, though I did eat roasted Locusts and bamboo worms, and I have to say they're soooooooo tasty!!

So anyway they have strong silk and they're a tasty nutritious morsel. However, what interests me with all wildlife, is getting a close look at how they live in their environment.

This Golden Orb Weaver Spider's web was over 1.5 meters wide, ovaled and vertical, it's very sticky and extremely difficult for any victim to make it's escape. So you'd think it would be crazy for anything to be flying around there on purpose anywhere near this web, no?

I'd agree if I was the prey of this highly tuned predator, but a chemical scent trial which attracts a red eyed member of milichiidae species, a kleptoparasitic milichiid fly. You can see them at rest on the spider's abdomen in the above photograph as the spider prepares a bee as a tasty snack of a liquified meal. The spider has no mechanism for eating and digesting solids, so it first injects the prey with digestive juices, which dissolves the prey, before being sucked up by the spider.

This makes the spider quite a slow eater, giving opportunity to these parasites to steal food from the the giant host.

In this next photograph you can see one fly is already settled on the now dissolved bee and at the bottom of the shot you can see another fly heading straight towards it.

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I wanted to capture the translucent nature of the spider's legs and capture the golden sparkles on the web so I was shooting into the light here and it's caused some lens flaring. Here is a tighter crop showing the details more clearly.

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Have you noticed what's different about this spider in comparison to others...................... This one only has seven legs, one was no doubt lost in a narrow escape from some sort of danger.

I love the way the shallow depth of field and bokeh, in effect, cross sections the web at the point of focus, the spider. Also as a pure fluke I caught another fly on it's way in at the bottom of frame again.

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Nature never will cease to amaze me, and I hope you've found this photography blog entertaining and interesting.

Equipment
Canon 550d
Canon EF70-300 'L' series @188mm
1/1000sec @ f5.0 iso400

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