Ariamnes cylindrogaster (꼬리거미)
… I thought a blade of grass or pine needle had blown onto the back of my camera only to find out it was a spider when I looked more closely.
Young deer are surprisingly hard to see among the leaf litter.
I almost stepped on it multiple times (fieldwork required rummaging about the same plot for couple of hours), the first time giving me a fright, as it “appeared” under my feet out of nowhere, the other times knowing where it is, but still finding it difficult to see from more than a couple of m away.
Its somewhat widely known among spider people in NZ, that there is a unknown number of alpine jumping spiders that are commonly known, but entirely undescribed/unnamed, just waiting for someone to do the work. I know someone had started a few years back, not sure how far they got.
This is one of my pics of that group which is IDable to…jumping spider.
This is the first shot that is so ever slightly out of focus. I ‘noticed’ this one on the outside wall of the park’s restroom.
The second, in-focus shot is what I posted in my observation, but I thought it would be more fun to show what I was trying to find first. Honestly, one of the toughest find-and-focus challenges I’ve ever come across.
Mine is this grasshopper. It’s not one of my research grade observations, so I’m not confident to say which species it belongs to. Anther camo-pro is this genius:
This is a masked crab spider, and he managed to camouflage in this white fungus infecting a coconut leaf (yes, I have a coconut tree in my garden. Most Indians have one). I would have never seen him if he hadn’t decided to stick his leg out to poke outside his hiding place.
This bark mantis. I went from not knowing they existed, to only wanting to find more! Unsurprisingly I didn’t. These grasshoppers. My success rate was pretty low - if I saw one, it would jump in a clump of grass, and 10 minutes later it was 50/50 whether I would find it.
And bonus points for being a non-arthopod, this nightjar decided to lay eggs in a popular picnic spot, so we would hang around the wider area and redirect people. I guess it laid the eggs at night when the area was closed and quiet. In any case the chick appeared to fledge, and it also engaged in the exact same pose/behaviour from hatching!
Here’s a pretty good one. I was running with my wife and all four of our ankles had just brushed past his nose before he fired up the rattles and we saw him. It’s a northern Pacific rattlesnake.
