When i moved here the basement rafters were so thick with webs that you could scoop a handful at will. My Convoy S2 got many hours of service with me vacuuming them up. These days the spiders are slowly rebuilding, and its hard to see single strands unless the light hits them a certain way. I have tried different angles, throw vs flood lights, and different tint (neutral vs cool white) but its still kinda hit and miss. What i have noticed is that background makes a big difference, a white background just reflects the light back and washes out webs and high density webbing is easy to spot, but beyond that its tricky to find webs until they are near complete.
Any tricks or ideas, UV light, or anything else that may help?
right, i forgot about that, spiders do shadow well on light coloured surfaces (and they are magnified), the webs shadow well if they have many strings.
If you have a headlight use it, or hold your s2 near your head. The spiders have eye shine like a dog. It looks like a shiney crystal. If you go outside on a summer night, look around. I have spotted spiders from across my yard doing this.
or if arachnophobic dont.
i have seen times here that a srk would reveal thousands of tiny eyeshines.
and those are just the ones facing your way.
i told my friend that night that they were all more afraid of her more than she is of them but she was not hearing any of that!
webs do cast good shadows when illuminated by a point source.a tiny spider once spun a web across the underside of one of my altilon modded lamps.
although it showed up nicely it would not photograph.spider is probably running around with a white cane with red tip now.
Yep, plenty of them here. I like spiders because they eat gnats and mosquitoes which we also have plenty of here. Sans spiders the flying pests would win and we’d have to relocate, so as long as they’re not in the house I leave them to do their good work.
What I need is a 4x18650 “Skeeterfire” light so I can toast the buggers in mid-air and watch them crash down in flames J) That would be more fun than a bug-light with a six-pack!
Around here the native black widows are being overrun by the invasive brown widows. They seem to multiply and spread so much faster. For every 50 brown widows, I might see one black. I go out the patio and yard at night with a flashlight to keep their number in check
My parents had a wolf spider “plague” in their backyard one year. During the day it wasn’t impressive, it just looked like someone had gone through with an aerator due to all the burrows, at night it was very impressive, with literally hundreds of bluish/white eyes shining when a flashlight was used. The only downside was that they would end up in the house, but it was much better than the orb weaver plague we had, those ones weave a web between trees across footpaths and get on your face or in your hair.
I’ll have to see if I can find any of the pictures I took.
We figure on one spider per room, fairly consistently (that’s visible, of course). If we remove that one, another moves in. Seems about the limit our house supports. More in fruit fly season. ” This is one of our common ones “:genus Phidippus, family Salticidae | Hank Roberts | Flickr (don’t click that if spider pictures scare you, it’s a macro photo of one on our wall). The hunting/jumping spiders studied turn out to have have excellent pattern recognition, see e.g. Dolev Y, Nelson XJ (2014) Innate Pattern Recognition and Categorization in a Jumping Spider. PLoS ONE 9(6): e97819. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0097819
had a big wolf spider overwinter in my place last year.could have swore i heard a tiny voice that reminded me to get more bananas.
sucker got big for the only prey being fruit flies.
Or maybe just a couple bug bombs. I set off about three in my garage a couple timesa year and the little buggers all come out of hiding and run around till they die.
If used I suspect the reports of Bort’s clown related demise will no longer be slightly exaggerated
I tried the misting, it works but not great, plus i can’t use it near electrical wires and boxes in my basement. I wish webs would glow under UV or something.
If you have a camera and a red laser pointer, you can put the camera on a stable surface/mount, set for long exposure and then wave the laser pointer back and forth. The resulting photo will be a stack of many passes of the laser beam reflecting off the webs so you’ll know exactly where they are. I’ve used this technique to do some pretty neat abstract art style photos. People are surprised when I tell them they’re just cobwebs under a dresser.
A green laser might be too bright (you don’t want to see the beam, just the reflections).
have you tried the ugliest blue/purple latticebright white tinted light you have?
the spiderwebs here (daddy long legs) in my area seemed to shine with odd LEDs that has low CRI
One of the best things about living in Northern Indiana is the lack of nasty bugs. No scorpions, fire ants, poisonous spiders, or poisonous snakes or other mean things that want to sting or bite you. When I lived in Houston, everything wanted to sting you.
The summers here are idealic. The winters tend to suck, not as bad as Chicago because we only get half the snow Chicago does but they are still cold.
