Black Widow panic, Proffitt, Texas
This is one of a pair of female Western Black Widows I found in a very large web on the supporting posts of a cattle gate. They might have been sharing the same web, or simply built their webs beside each other, but with a bit of overlap. In an effort to get my camera into a better shooting position... more parallel with the silk strands supporting the spiders, the reflectors of the macro bracket pushed into the web. This large-scale disturbance sent the widows fleeing to their "refuge" under a cross-member of the gate. This is the first occasion where I observed stressed black widows dispensing a line of silk with large droplets of sticky "glue" behind them as they bolted for safety. This behavior might be to foil rapid pursuit by a predator. I touched one of the larger drops in the upper left with a piece of grass and it had the consistency of heavy syrup. This spider was the slower of the two, but was still moving too fast for me to focus as accurately as I'd like. The droplet-laden line of silk to her left was produced by her faster companion going in the opposite direction.
Nikon 105mm f/2.5 with the objective from a junk Soligor 90-230mm lens reverse mounted on the front. Pop-up flash lighting.
DSC-4716
Black Widow panic, Proffitt, Texas
This is one of a pair of female Western Black Widows I found in a very large web on the supporting posts of a cattle gate. They might have been sharing the same web, or simply built their webs beside each other, but with a bit of overlap. In an effort to get my camera into a better shooting position... more parallel with the silk strands supporting the spiders, the reflectors of the macro bracket pushed into the web. This large-scale disturbance sent the widows fleeing to their "refuge" under a cross-member of the gate. This is the first occasion where I observed stressed black widows dispensing a line of silk with large droplets of sticky "glue" behind them as they bolted for safety. This behavior might be to foil rapid pursuit by a predator. I touched one of the larger drops in the upper left with a piece of grass and it had the consistency of heavy syrup. This spider was the slower of the two, but was still moving too fast for me to focus as accurately as I'd like. The droplet-laden line of silk to her left was produced by her faster companion going in the opposite direction.
Nikon 105mm f/2.5 with the objective from a junk Soligor 90-230mm lens reverse mounted on the front. Pop-up flash lighting.
DSC-4716