Please send in your good wildlife photos.
Today we have a batch of frigid photos from Tony Eales in Queensland. Tony’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
The cold, at least cold for here, weather has kept most of the bugs and beasties in hiding but the nice thing about this weather is dewy mornings. I went to the local national park and spent a good amount of time photographing dew on flowers and spiderwebs and such.
I discovered a nice flowering patch of a small species of terrestrial bladderwort that I haven’t seen before, Utricularia caerulea.
There were also the tiny white flowers of Mitrasacme paludosa:
And the Common Bog Rush, Schoenus apogon:
As well as the young emerging vines of a climbing sundew, Drosera lunata:
I even found myself photographing the shed moult of a Eurybrachid planthopper:
But of course, the most delicate and beautiful structures were the spider webs. This is a small tent spider, Cyrtophora sp.:
This one, I’m not too sure about, I think it might be a money spider, Linyphidae, but I could well be mistaken:
And best of all were these horizontal orb webs of the common Tetragnanthid, Leucauge dromedaria, the Silver Orbweaver.
Here’s a close up of the droplines that are attached to the outer web. I had never noticed these before as they are basically invisible without the dew:
And this is the spider:
Thank you! This is a magical set of photos — such evanescent beauty captured so well.
Yes, indeed! Couldn’t have said it any better.
“Readers’ Wildlife Photos” is my favorite feature on this web page! Thank you Jerry for making it possible, and THANK YOU contributors for making my day on so many days!
Very beautiful. We have a similar Utricularia bladderwort flower here in Andean South America!
Very nice. Thanks for the post. Lovely compositions. GROG
Beautiful, beautiful photos. I have to wonder whether the dew is annoying to the spiders, and if they try to clear it off so the web is harder to see for potential prey…or if it just resolves quickly enough on its own that they don’t need to bother.
I think with the dew, the spiders are so cooled down they are basically asleep. I did have a large dome web spider that set up where my pot plants get daily spray irrigation. When the spray turned off it would shake the web to get rid of the water.
Cool!
Lovely! We have a related species to your silver orbweaver – – the orchard orbweaver which is in the same genus. It too has a horizontal-ish orb web, and now I wonder if it also has droplines.
Yes I’ve seen photos of others in that genus from North America. Very similar looking. I read somewhere that some photographers and researchers carry a spray bottle to make the dew effect and see such otherwise invisible structures
Lovely pictures!
“He’s balancing a diamond
On a blade of grass
The dew will settle on our graves
When all the world is green.”
Nice. I’m a big fan of Waits.