The garden is full of spiders - Between every shrub or tree, there's a
spider's web. And at the centre of these webs are garden spiders of all
sizes. I notice an interesting thing - that the smaller and medium sized
spiders are entirely OK about a human wandering up to them with a
tripod and zooming a long black lens in on them. On the other hand, the
largest spiders - the really impressive ones - take immediate
fright and leg it back into the cover of the bushes. So the spiders I
offer are merely the medium-sized ones. Why do the large ones run off?
Are they conditioned to know that their very bulk makes them
tasty morsels to birds? Which rather implies a degree of
self-consiousness... "I'm big enough to be considered food by that large
mammal with that black three-legged thing over there - RUN!"
Another
thing of interest is the variations in how neat and symmetrical a
spider makes its web. Is the web neat because the spider possesses the
neatness gene? Or because the wind wasn't blowing so hard? Is there a
evolutionary advantage to spinning neat, symmetrical webs? Above: Spider on the left's a bit of an untidy specimen compared to the one on the right. Biology or environment?
I
bring out the 55mm Macro-Nikkor, bounce some sunlight onto the subject
with a table mirror, and - what a beast! Worth clicking to see the
portrait of a spider, shot from its underside, in its full glory.
I
wonder what it's thinking, other than sensing a threat in my (close)
presence with macro lens. Do spiders have consciousness as in
self-awareness?