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Barrdwing wrote:
oh FABULOUS! Now I know what those spiders in the barn are! Brown widows! eeeyarrrgh . . . I had a feeling they weren’t nice . . . .
Anybody ever seen a trap-door spider? They look a lot like the second photo Nirvana posted. They’re big–the size of a small tarantula–and built like little linebackers. They live in burrows in the ground and spin a silk lid for the burrow, then camouflage it with ground litter. You literally can not tell where the burrow is when the door is closed. They lurk near the entrance and wait for something yummy to wander by, then pop out like the Jack-in-the-box from hell and grab it. If anybody does a horror film with giant trap-door spiders, I will be the first person NOT in line to see it.
Anyway. One morning my mom found a trap-door spider sitting in her burrow with the trap-door resting on her back, for all the world looking like she was sitting on the porch enjoying the morning sun. Mom had her new zoom lens and wanted to get a good close-up shot. So here’s my mom, stretched out on a dirt road on her stomach, with her camera lens two inches from this spider’s face, fiddling with the f-stop. Ma’am Spider, for her part, is all hunched up nibbling her fangs, trying to decide whether to flee or leap onto the lens. Mom isn’t wild about spiders either, and with the zoom on this spider looked like it was the size of an elk. She laughed nervously and said that if the spider jumped for the lens, she was going to be up off the ground and running like mad, so would I please pick up the camera in that case so that Dad wouldn’t know she’d left it on the ground.
Spider didn’t jump. Mom got her photo. It’s horrifying. If I had a copy, I’d post it, but frankly it creeps me out too much to have one! 😛
Awww…but i wanna see…trap door spiders are so cool! Though my favorite kind of spider are the jumpers…jumpers are so neat.
Kyrin
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