Saturday, August 28, 2010

A Real Live Spiderman Signal - Picture

Definitely not the Spider Pig
This spider has taken up residence between two slash pines near the house.  This one, has a web that is probably as big as the T Shirt I'm wearing right now, and would cover your entire palm from tip to tip of the leg.

I will pause for you to look at your hand.

To give you an idea, I have a rather run of the mill 8.5 MP Samsung Digital Camera.  Nothing all that special by today's standards.  It isn't an SLR, has a little 3 inch screen in the back that makes it difficult to do true close up photography because I can't discern the detail, and won't accept external lenses.  Model S85.  Mine is black.

The nice thing about this camera is that it is VERY flexible.  I've learned how to use it fairly well as you can see from the pictures you see on the blog.  I tend to be very free with taking pictures now that I don't have to pay for a developer.  The pictures are originally 3264 by 2448 which is large enough that it is bigger than any computer monitor I have ever used.  There's a lot of room to edit out bits.  This bit is about an eighth of the picture, then I reduced it down to 640 by 480.

So why all that blather?   I was standing about 20 feet from this monster bug when I took the shot.  Using the Optical Zoom, I managed to get a nice frame that had all sorts of things caught in the web, then cut it down for here.  Maybe I'm patting myself on the back too much, but I'm surprised how well this turned out. 

On the other hand, it also goes far to tell you just how big this monster is by my Northern standards.  In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, spiders are dinky little things, rarely larger than your smallest fingernail.  I'm just not used to seeing a creature that is large enough to carry off a Buick hanging in mid air.

Someone had earlier tossed a piece of palm front into that web, and it remained there.  A hand sized piece of palm stem, held up by a T Shirt sized spider web glistening in the sun, and creating a home for a palm sized spider that has been there for months at this point.  That says a lot for just how big all of this is. 

So every time we do yard work, we get the broom and knock down anything that is "in the way".  We don't know if this particular spider is poisonous, but we treat it and all the wildlife here as if it is.  They're not Geckos after all!

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