Sometimes it happens, just like when I was just a child with a passion for tadpoles. I go out on the field will my ”normal adult passion” and my so-called experience and finally end the day with an amazing punch of deliberate and great astonishment for something amazing that nature gave me the chance to see.
That was the day…. what day? one day I was looking for Nemesia sp. trapdoor spiders together with my arachnologist friends from Turin.
But that day wasn’t a normal “trapdoor-day”. We found something really interesting.
Searching for trapdoors is a dirty thing.
You’ve to use a small shovel to see the holes in the ground and then follow them slowly until you find their host. I was there trying to find my first one (while my more experienced friends had “a bucket” of already caught ones) when I found a large burrow. At the end of it there was a large adult Nemesia sp. but she wasn’t alone. She was defending a treasure with all its legs, and you know, trapdoor spiders have many legs and huge fangs…
When I moved closer I was able to see she was defending her cocoon, the eggsac, the container of her spawn. And from that silk-made container some very small and clear replicas of her mother were coming out to life. I stopped my be-serious-and-work mode to be kicked back to childhood, but I wasn’t dying as you can think. I was just in front of something that is normally a nature’s secret, something so intimate I almost felt disappointed for disturbing it in some way. But I was privileged as well, looking at the beginning of a new generation of a species so secretive that’s even difficult to see the adults!
Fortunately enough I also took all my camera gear together with the shovel and the zoological stuff (‘though my back strongly disagree with me about the luckiness of the circumstance..).
So, after taking a last marveled glance at them, I took some shots of the tiny-winy eight-legged things emerging from the eggsac. They’ll disperse in the world around, making small invisible holes, small invisible (to us) lives with great impact in their ecosystems. Small patient sit-and-wait predators that still can kick me back to my childhood and leaving me breathless once again.
