Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning

Today I decided to have an experiment with Miagrammopes. I was curious about her response to having one end of her trap line cut. Here she is in her linear configuration - a tight trap line

Here to the left, you can see a small tangle of cribellate silk, a multi nonaligned group of filaments that apparently faciliates capture of an insect that collides with the strand

Here she is aligned with the trapline attachment to the leaf. I then detached the other end (maybe 0.5 M long)

She is now in her retrieval posture. You can see slack silk between the tip of her front legs and behind the metatarsel joint

Here you can see a tightly wound ball of silk between her palps (you can also see two of her 8 eyes behind the palps

Now that she has recovered the slack silk, she will probably eat it and recycle the protein. Here she is climbing onto the leaf and will look for the attachement point of another trap line

For whatever reason, here she is back just hanging in the breeze. Perhaps thinking about how to get out of this mess that I made, or perhaps fascinated by the flash of my camera

After some time, she mounts the other trap line and her is increasing the tension. Her curved posture is a sign that the trap line is loose

Above if you look the right, there are alternating thick and thin strands of silk. Here is a closer view

And to the left is what I call a tangle ball (poorly focused) of silk, the residual of the tensioning process. I shall repeat this experiment. Why? Because it is thought that Miagrammopes has a single strand web and here, there are at least two trap lines originating from the same leaf. Is this true with others? I'll try to find out.

Odds and ends - A juvenile Nephila

A skipper

And the seed pod of a Simpoh flower

C. Frank Starmer

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