[!quote] From Wikipedia: Arachne (/əˈrækniː/ⓘ; from Ancient Greek: Ἀράχνη, romanized: Arákhnē, lit. ‘spider’, cognate with Latinaraneus)[1] is the protagonist of a tale in classical mythology known primarily from the version told by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE). In Book Six of his epic poem Metamorphoses, Ovid recounts how the talented mortal Arachne challenged the goddess Minerva (the Roman equivalent of Athena) to a weaving contest. When Minerva could find no flaws in the tapestry Arachne had woven for the contest, the goddess became enraged and beat the girl with her shuttle. After Arachne hanged herself out of shame, she was transformed into a spider. The myth both provided an etiology of spiders’ web-spinning abilities and was a cautionary tale about hubris.
Julie Taymor’s original concept for the (terrible but technically spectacular) musical Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark was heavily based on the Arachne mythos. (It all eventually got written out except the opening number which required a billion dollars worth of scenery they couldn’t scrap.)
[!warning] CW - theatrically simulated hanging, realistic costume spider legs
To show how ludicrous this concept was, here’s another cut song “Deeply Furious” about spiders liking shoes that seriously is straight out of a musical version of Silent Hill.
[!warning] CW - Way too many legs, both spider and humanoid
Caught a large centipede that was having a case of zoomies in my bathroom while I was still on the toilet. I didn’t want to create a lot of noise by opening the back door, so I waited to release it after the sun had risen.
By that time, the centipede was very asleep. I tried tapping the jar to wake it, and it did not want to wake up. It stirred a bit when I tapped, but it was visibly sleepy.
I finally slowly nudged it out of the jar with a paper towel, which caused it to stir lazily some more, but then it realized what was happening, and it awkwardly woke up in a panic to escape under some dead leaves.
Centipedes are the one house critter I’m a bit wary of because I’ve always heard while they’re not lethal to humans they are aggressive and can bite; on a quick research, the house-sized variety are more timid and usually cannot bite human skin - it’s the larger tropical versions that can inflict a painful bite and the venom can cause swelling and fever, though a bite is not generally life-threatening.
The one thing to know is centipedes are asocial and territorial and aggressive towards each other, so if you see one in your house, that is probably the only one - they don’t infest and swarm a location like beetles. They are apparently similarly beneficial like spiders because they prey on and clear out smaller insect pests.
If you see one, that’s your “house centipede” and you needn’t kill or emigrate it unless you have pets or small children whom it might cause problems for.
Just anecdotally, in my home we get multiple who seem to come and go and either overlap or have a very tight timeshare agreement. They’re different sizes, too– I’ll see a big one in the afternoon, a small one in the evening, etc– so I don’t think there’s a fierce competition that’ll result in one very large centipede. Which is good; it means my 7 pound dog is safe. (Probably.) I think they probably just come for a quick hunt & a visit, and to indulge in their most favorite hobby, drowning in said dog’s water dish.
A couple shots of a little member of Oxyopidae, the lynx spiders. They’re mostly ambush hunters, so you find them wandering the yard and garden rather than waiting in webs. They’re also very quick, and get from place to place via a combination of scurrying and jumping. Although they’re mostly visual hunters, they don’t react as much to a human nearby as members of Salticidae, the true jumping spiders, do.
Description: The same lynx spider on the same flower, having turned around and stretched its legs out, making its general body plan a little more apparent.
The petals of the wilted cucumber flower are somewhere in the neighborhood of half an inch/1 cm long, to give a sense of the size of spider.
These shots are about the limit of the detail I can get on small subjects like this with the optics on my old iPhone.
This post is a reply to one of my earlier posts in the thread which has a photo of the same kind of spider, for comparison.
Description: A blurry mess that vaguely resembles a photo of a spider obscured with the spoiler filter.
The little cucumber blossom (and the spider on it) were getting blown around by every little breeze. Which in addition to adding motion blur, tends to confuse the phone camera’s auto focus so it keeps trying to switch the focal plane from the thing I’m trying to photograph and the leaf in the background.
The secret to getting one good nature photo is to take about a hundred.
Good thing photos are essentially free with digital cameras and modern storage and you can just delete the bad shots to free up storage for new pics… Imagine how annoying it would be back in the film days to spend all that money on a roll of film and be lucky if one shot on the roll is decent… and then having to wait for the film to be developed to even know if anything on the roll is worth anything instead of being able to immediately inspect the results and maybe try again if your subject isn’t very camera shy.
If you were just an average consumer using one of the many cartridge-based film standards it would absolutely be prohibitive to shoot as freely as you can these days digitally. But if you were a “serious” photographer you were just carrying around as many rolls as you could cram into your camera bag. And if you were a “professional” photographer you (or your employer) were almost certainly buying your film in bulk, and you were winding your own rolls and developing your own shots.
“Professional” in scare quotes there because I occasionally sold photos to the local paper and it was an economic necessity at that level. And that was the absolute bare minimum for being considered “professional” (in that the work was paid for on a regular basis).
