Monday, November 08, 2010

[jules' pics] Arachnaphobes look away now!

Japanese spidey

Japanese spidey

Japanese spidey

As I have remarked before, despite being the size of your hand, the nephila clavata, tends to build her webs above head height, presumably so that she doesn't have to keep rebuilding it all the time. Thus, taking a good macro shot is usually impossible. Off the beaten track in deepest dankest Kamakura, however, the webs are strung about the low bows of the trees. Eeeek!


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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/07/2010 11:49:00 PM

4 comments:

Marco said...

Being an arachnophobe (somewhat), I just tell myself you used a 50* zoomlens, so these enormous spiders are in reality just a few mm in size. I won't believe they are the size of your hand until I see you hold one!
(call me skeptic...)

jules said...

Dear Marco,

I caught arachnophobia from my Pa, but have had to get over it in Japan!

This was a large nephila clavata but *of course* not _measurably_ as big as my hand - because of the well known mushi uncertainty principle which is that, when confronted by a measuring device the shrinkage in the size of the mushi is proportional to the number of legs.

So - her body was about 3 cm, meaning her legs would merely spread across the palm of my little girly hand. But they are kind of aggressive spiders so I wouldn't really fancy trying to do the measurement.

(Mushi is the handy Japanese names for all insects, spiders, centipedes and whatnot... )

Marco said...

3 cm? *shudder*

Enough to get even my cat running for cover (anything 2 cm or below gets eaten though!).

C W Magee said...

Do they eat birds like the big Queensland orb weavers?