Ok... quick diversion to a minor point of technicality, it was yesterday, but as I find myself still awake at 12:30 in the morning, I'm sure you can forgive my moment of temporal displacement... where was I?
Right, so I was about to feed my cat when I noticed out the window that there was a wasp, and it was just putting the finishing touches of it's little death moves against this rather largish spider. I should probably show you a photo at this point...
I've never in my life ever seen this sort of thing happen before. First of all, that's the biggest wasp I ever saw, and the nastiest looking one too. While the spider isn't the biggest Huntsman I ever saw, it's the fact that it's 3-4 times bigger, and a hell of a lot scarier looking than the wasp is, and yet this wasp has easily paralyzed the spider and is moving about with a purpose. Naturally I abandoned my cat feeding duty (much to Rascal's dismay), grabbed the only camera I could reach in a hurry (my Canon 600D), and raced outside to film the wasp doing it's thing.
Sadly, the camera is not designed to film close up, so the focus is manual and all over the place, and shakes a bit too much because the balance of the camera is all wrong for shooting this sort of thing one-handed, but I'm glad I captured it regardless. I also used this to throw together my very first public video to stick onto YouTube. I made the mistake however of uploading the video directly from the software. The annoying thing is that the audio was meant to have been disabled, but something in the software ignored me, so all of my embarrassing commentary has ended up on the video too... so now I'll be learning about how to update a video on YouTube, and adding a lovely music/voice-over track to it after the fact.
Yesterday the Thunder, today a spider killing wasp with an attitude and absolutely AWESOME strength. Yet another amazing thing that nature has shown me in recent days.
Some interesting observations while I was editing the video, were that the wasp has a habit of using it's antennae when walking about. There was a moment when it wanders away from the spider, and then when it approaches the spider again, it's antennae are laid flat all over the spider, as if it is sizing the prey up and orienting itself so that it knows which end to grab. I know that it's distance vision is quite good, and it certainly used its eyesight when it thought that I was getting too close as I grabbed my lens cap. I also saw it's eye focused on me in several scenes as it was dragging the spider along. Everywhere else though, antennae were used to size up everything from the terrain, to how it was balancing the spider while holding it suspended only from it's jaws away from the wall of the house.
Yeah, you might be thinking that it's just an insect doing it's thing, but there was a moment where the wasp made a clear decision to change its approach and drag the spider a different way so that it could meet its goal of dragging the carcass to the roof. Yes, lateral thinking in an insect. That's the sort of stuff that kind of blows me away, and which I love to witness whenever I find myself observing something in nature. The sort of behaviour that these creatures are capable of which comes completely out of the blue, and delights and surprises me all at once.
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