Apparently, I’ve been starving my poor babies, because I showed up with a big new menu item for lunch and those spiders were on it, pumping these waxworms full of venom and chowing down on maggoty soup. Yum!
A few details: the spider is named Selena, she’s from San Antonio, Texas, and her species is Steatoda triangulosa. The victim is a waxworm from a bait shop in Alexandria, Minnesota. All was recorded with a Canon t5i and a Tokina 100mm f/2.8 macro lens (hint: don’t use the autofocus on this, it’s slow and noisy, and doesn’t track little spiders well). Selena wasn’t special, all the spiders in my colony reacted with this kind of zeal to the plump bounty dropped in their laps.
Proof of creationism! Only a sick, twisted mind that would torture people for eternity could create gruesome ways to die like this!
Exuding webbing obviously requires resources, so presumably they wouldn’t do it any more than is necessary. On the other hand, in natural circumstances at least some prey will escape, so presumably better to be safe than sorry.
After a gruesome meal like that, Selena needs to aquire a service animal for her emotional well-being: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/basilisk
More feeding ideas, but you need more spiders! https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/destroy
FWIW, you should really name a big mamma spider Louise, to commemorate the well-known sculptor Louise Bourgeois whose giant spider sculptures are found in several major art museums. Especially her Maman, 10 meters high with a sack of marble eggs.
It’s not so much the lens as it is the camera body where the autofocus fails. My T5i with a Canon 100mm EF-L macro can’t autofocus for shit either on video. From what I’ve read, most people don’t bother with autofocus on dSLR video.
I kept thinking about the ending of the original “The Fly”. “Help meeeee! Help meeee! Aaaargh!”