I'll be back

March 31, 2015 • 1 Comment

I used to have something of a reputation for taking (very) close-up photographs of tiny jumping spiders. They’re very photogenic after all, with a pair of huge forward-facing (anterior median) eyes making them look quite errr…. cute, in a Shrek’s Puss-in-boots sort of way.

Not this one though.

I was flicking through some very old photographs yesterday, looking at jumping spider snaps in particular, and found this one below.

I must have missed this shot back in the summer of 2008, when I took it.

I thought it was a tiny (normal) female zebra (jumping) spider that I had photographed – but look closer – one of her big eyes seems to be…. well…. GLOWING?!

This isn’t a “red eye photo” as such, produced by firing a flash directly onto a reflective retina – you’ll have trouble getting a red-eye shot of a spider’s eyes (one of a few reasons that doesn’t happen is that a spider’s eyes have a very different structure to our own), and anyway, the red glow clearly doesn't fill the entire viewable retina.

So either this spider has an ocular disease of some sort, is a new species of jumping spider… or is in fact a mutant (or robot) zebra spider, perhaps here after travelling back through time and here to kill her original nemesis (the human race?!).

Just a thought.

There is one other record of a jumping spider photographed with a glowing red eye I've discovered - from Greece of all countries, but I haven't actually been allowed to see the photograph due to their Government restrictions on classified documents.

All I know for sure is that the investigating Greek scientists named it the "ανόητου Απριλίου spider".

I don’t take many photos of jumping spiders these days, (I don’t seem to have time to take many photos at all in actual fact), but I think I’ll be looking verrrry closely at any jumping spiders I see this year.

I suggest you do too…

TBR.

Keywords: Zebra spider, eye, glowing, glowing eye, jumping spider, terminator, weird eye, ανόητου Απριλίου

Comments

The Black Rabbit(non-registered)

Readers might like to visit the last hyperlink in the post (click on the Greek name for a similar spider) to get a MUCH clearer idea of what this spider might mean to us...
Thanks.
TBR

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