Please pardon the crude title. 🙂 This post is dedicated to the Spitting Spider (Scytodidae family). It hunts by shooting gooey spit from its claws towards its prey at extreme speeds (attack sequence completes within 1/700th of a second according to Wikipedia). This spit is both sticky and venomous, rendering the prey immobile.

Here’s a video describing the spitting spider, and illustrates its battle with a jumping spider.


Today’s trip to Durian Loop had its highlights in a Spitting Spider carrying an egg sac, and a bunch of Mantidflies.

#1 Spitting Spider carrying its egg sac.

#2 Side view. The head is big!

#3 It turned up to look at me! So I made it into a 3D rocking sequence.

#4 Extreme close up at its face and eggs. The shapes of the eggs can be seen through the sac.

#5 Close up of its side

#6 Final shot before it went back to its motherly duties

#7 Had my Raynox on, so took a quick shot of this jumping spider

#8 This weevil was motionless on a tree trunk. Too big for my Raynox and out of focus! 🙁

#9 Took out the Raynox for this view 🙂

#10 Robberfly, possibly a wasp mimic?

#11 A brown mantidfly. Same pattern as the “tiger” mantidfly that we usually see.

#12 Managed to get really close to one of the Mantidflies. This picture was shot by Lance from his mobile phone.

#13 And the resulting shot. I always wanted to get a face shot of this fella!

#14 Another random angle of the Mantidfly

The complete album can be viewed here.

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