The patience of this water spider is simply amazing, as it can wait hours for a kill.
Look! At last the spider caught a Damselfly.
It is the last day of the year and we wish all of our friends, and everyone else on Hive, a happy New Year.
This is a Common Water spider, and his hunting style was maybe copied by some professional wildlife hunters. As the sun rises, the spider sits and scans the pool. He will then identify a leaf in the water where a damselfly likes to sit and then the spider will ever so slowly move over to sit near the spot. It can be a short, or a half day wait, as sooner or later, the damselfly will return to sit at the spot and that's when the spider will grab it in a flash.
Now don't run away when you see the spider, as I also have some other lovely photos to show you :)
It is the damselfly mating season and the males fly all over searching for females. This damselfly male got lucky.
Slowly the tail part of the damselfly was eaten up.
Almost done and the spider does not eat the head, wings and the legs of the damselfly, you can see it protruding behind the spider.
It was one of these that the spider caught and this one below was trying to get a bug that was flying close to his boat :)
I think that it's a Variable Sprite (Pseudagrion sjoestedti).
Damselflies are lovely little critters, and we have a wide range of species with many different colors.
Now I bet that spider will not catch the bees, as they carry a nasty sting.
Finally, I end the post with this Red-veined Dragonfly coming in to land on a water plant stem.
We have another power cut soon, so I still have a lot to do. I hate to rush things, but at times things in life are out of our hands. In this post I tried to show you that nothing in nature gets wasted, as the spider eats a damselfly and a damselfly eats bugs.
So almost everything eats everything in nature, and we are lucky that nothing hunts and eats humans :)
Nature is wonderful to explore and it holds countless lessons for mankind, it is also a healer as it has a trove of medicinal plants that can fix many of our ailments.
If only we would all learn to start looking after nature instead of poisoning and destroying it.
We recently went for blood tests to see if there are toxic chemicals in our bloodstreams, and we are waiting for the results. Mankind relies heavily on chemicals to protect and preserve their produce, and the strong winds can spread the poisons over vast distances. So we will wait to see.
Hope you enjoyed the story and the photos.
And That's All Friends.
Photos by Zac Smith-All Rights Reserved.
Camera: Canon Powershot SX70HS Bridge camera.
