It feels like a nightmare. The longer you stare, the scarier it gets. I place myself in the web, tangled and stuck in the snare of this demonic creature. Its venom liquifies the inners of its victims. The spider then sucks the liquified inners out, a gut smoothie of sorts. Is this not the stuff of nightmares? If you watched the film The Lord of the Rings, you are will be familiar with the scene of the spiders.
Yesterday, I posted a travel write up and in there I noted how close we lived to these spider-friends. But we easily demonise these creatures because of their nightmarish look, and what they do to their prey. One can understand why we do it, that visceral and gut churning emotion you get when you almost walk into its nest. However, we need to realise that they play a central role in the ecosystem, like so many others.
Upon walking underneath the spider's massive web (almost 3 meters across), I saw just how many bugs, flies, and other things it caught in its web. This proves that it helps us, cleaning our kitchen from the pesky flies, keeping the bees away from our windows. Yet we see these spiders as the enemy.
And in some sense, this is correct, as when they bite you the consequences can be detrimental. The answer is not easy, co-inhabitance is not always possible.
But it remains a beautiful animal to ponder, a creature out of our nightmares, colorful, yet scary.
Sometimes when you look into the eyes of another animal, you can feel a shared "humanity" or "commonality", shared empathy and so on. But when I look into the cold bead eyes of a spider, I feel strange feelings. It creates a discomfort, something alien. When you look into the eyes of a lion in captivity, there are brief moments where your eyes lock into each other, and there is a shared feeling of sorts. But with this spider, spiders in general, it feels alien, cold, but not the sorts where I want to destroy the strange, but rather something I just cannot comprehend.
Either way, this spider was beautiful, a photographic moment in its perfect stillness. It sat waiting for its next victim. All I had to do was point and shoot with my camera. It was a strange and eerie moment, but a photographic one nonetheless.
I hope that this spider made your stomach churn a bit, but that you can also appreciate its beauty.
For now, happy photographing and keep well.
All of the musings and writings are my own, albeit inspired by the nightmarish moment. The photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and Tamron 300mm zoom lens or 50mm Nikkor lens.