Danse Macabre: The Sinister Life of 'Shelob' - A Female Garden Spider скачать в хорошем качестве

Danse Macabre: The Sinister Life of 'Shelob' - A Female Garden Spider

Best watched on the YouTube HD setting on a monitor. This is the result of spending many hours watching and filming what we've come to call 'Shelob', a large female garden spider which is living just outside our back door, on a bank covered with low vegetation, and this year, just a few Geranium procurrens flowers. These are very attractive in August for many different insects. Which makes it a potentially rich source of food for 'Shelob' and she's grown considerably in size over the 2 weeks I've been filming her. I had no idea a spider could tackle and consume so many bees, in a single day. Or that she consumes her inevitably damaged web each night, and then reconstructs it completely, usually in the early hours. By eating the silk, she not only recycles its nutrients, but also captures some moisture from the dew collected on it overnight. Heavy rain will mean she can't do this, and she ends up with little chance of food the following day. She's far more patient than I was - despite hours spent, I failed to capture the actual moment the insect (usually a bee) flew into the web, and she came shooting out to wrap it up. Although I have many scenes of bees trussed, being carried back to her lair, and then eaten, and discarded. Spiders also don't possess a sting, unlike Tolkein's fictional spider-like monster. Rather, she relies on biting her prey and injecting a venom which partially paralyses them, and begins to break down their body structures. Spiders have a very narrow gut, so they have to take in all their food in liquid form, pre-digested. So after she's speedily raced towards any hapless insect which has blundered into her web, she'll quickly spray some more silk fibres over them to truss them up, then either leave them hanging, or immediately take them back to her lair. Which in Shelob's case, is beneath a tent of Geranium leaves. Her fat orange body is swollen with developing eggs in her ovary, and very soon she'll need to mate with a much smaller male. This is very risky for the male since if he doesn't time it right (the cue to her receptiveness is chemical pheromones she releases), then she'll trap and eat him as well, whether he's mated with her or not. All prey are essentially bitten again once safely back in the lair, and the liquid is gradually sucked out of their body cavity. When she's finished, all that's left is the outer exoskeleton of the insect, which she simply jettisons to the ground beneath her. I'll never look at orb spider cobwebs in quite the same way again. Finally, not all garden spiders have the same attractive colouring - all the ones with webs anchored around our rusty metal table top, which I've taken many pictures of over the years, have almost black bodies and look rather more menacing than 'Shelob'. I thought Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns, was an appropriate piece of music, together with some August morning bird song to accompany the video. The recording is by an Accordion orchestra and solo accordion, thanks to Paul De Bra and his group, and to Musopen for allowing it to be used in this way. For more information about our garden plantings, wildflower meadows, insect-friendly flowers, and low-intervention honey bees, see our website: https://thegardenimpressionists.com/