Author Koh Lin ◦
Life can get complicated… sometimes, things do not go right… the smooth sailing has hit some turbulence… and there appears to be no way out. So it is, your life may become a tangled web… or like me you walk into a huge web!
In my younger days… well, even a couple of years ago… you would have heard me screaming eeeghhh!!! aaahhh…!!! thrashing my arms around, as I ran around in circles, trying to get the spider web off my head, my arms, my body… imagining this horrible huge arachnid crawling somewhere on me. Walking into a giant spider web is not a pleasurable experience, especially when it is unexpected.
So you can see back then, I really wasn’t a fan of spiders, or anything creepy crawly for that matter. It was not like this was the first time I had walked into a spider’s web, but this time it was different. My life had moved along a certain path…
My first instinct was to semi-freeze, turn my head to see where the spider in the web was, and simultaneously get my mobile phone out of my pocket.
Aaahhh, I can hear some of you say, he is an addict. What do they call it… “smartphone obsession…” “mobile addiction…” aaahhh… he has a “nomophobia” — a “no-mobile-phone-phobia”.
Well I am not into selfies, and I am not a celeb stalker, unless you call those little “creepy crawlies” celebs. Yet I must admit, my smart phone is usually always in my pocket for those once in a life moments… and boy have I had a few of those.
There she was. I say she, because I read somewhere that the males are much smaller… some 6 millimetres, whereas the female can be up to 4 centimetres in size. and this sizeable female was smack bang in the centre of her web.
The Australian Golden Orb Weaver, Trichonephila edulis, for the more sciency among us… now I had to google that to see if there was such a word… and yes there is, and there are two spellings of the word, sciencey (informal) and sciency, both being adjectives. But I digress…
Admiring this wonderful specimen of a golden orb, I knew I had to move very carefully around the web, so I could get photos of her underside. My trusty mobile phone did not let me down…
Well moving around the spider was not easy. Especially when you are holding your mobile, tip-toeing around the plants below, whilst keeping one eye on the spider and trying to avoid the strands of web. It wasn’t easy, especially if I accidentally touched part of the web, it would send tremors along the strands. Not that the spider did much, except to turn her body slightly, keeping me in sight.
So there I was, moving in slow motion, with a heightened scene of now…
It wasn’t till I got home, that I could examine my photos closely, and I was ecstatic at the results. It was then I realised that I like to look at spiders… well almost any creepy crawlies that stay still long enough for me to capture on my mobile camera…
There must be a life lesson in this… 😀
You can read up about the Australian Golden Orb Weaver Spider (Trichonephila edulis) and other arachnids in our Fauna section under Spiders.