Ok, I may have gone a little far here ahem!

Once again, our conservatory had visitors. Ok hands up we had about 4 or 5 Hovers flying about in there. I could have captured them all and let them go (which is generally what I do) however I had a rather morbid idea this time. Knowing outside there was a rather sizeable Diadem Orb Weaving Spider in the garden, I popped out and captured it. I also captured one of the hovers and err. well, introduced them to each other in a beaker. The inevitable happened.

Here's a sequence of images. I apologise in advance if some are a little disturbed by this. ;)

The Big Gal





This shot shows the hover fly having flipped onto its back attempting to escape. It is alive at this point. The spider is rearing up.



A struggle ensues.



The obvious victor, the spider sinks its jaws into the face of the hover and proceeds to feed.





This shot is taken with 3 extension tubes on the 100L



And this last image I'll admit is even more morbid. The spider actually twisted the head off the hover but you can see that the internal food/wind pipe is still intact. urrghh!!

Very nice pics and that last one is interesting, how were you able to get the spider to eat the fly starve it....lol

Cheers. :)

As for the spider eating the fly...it's what they do . It didn't need any encouragement at all and I think it was a spider that was regularly getting meals outside as it was a decent size. I put them both in and it was about 10 seconds later that the spider grabbed the hover.

Wonderous work Ian - excellently done.


Paul.

Good series Ian
Brian v.

Cheers Paul, Brian :)

superb series Ian , very good exposure

Thank you Phil :). Can you believe I got moaned at by a couple of posters over at TP for these? :). Apparently, I've treated life disrespectfully.

I'm not sure how what I did above differs from owning a tarantula but hey ho :)

Deadly kiss

WOW! just awesome! were they moving fast or did you have plenty of time to take multiple shots???

seems like there's a ton of depth and I thought you wouldn't get all that with macro with such a long focal length - please note i've not got a macro lens and really have very very little idea about it - it's just that I didn't realise that was possible

Thanks Predrag, and Jason. :)

Jason, The initial engagement was a little quick but once the spider took hold, there was very little movement as it paralysed the hoverfly. Once it began feeding, the only movement was the pulsing of the spiders legs as it was sucking it's meal up :). In face, this would have been an MPE-65 owners dream as they could have easily shot at 5xMag and stacked as many images as they wanted :)

With regards to the DoF, I've found that shooting at F11 gives me a good quantity of DoF without having to over compensate with increased flash output or increased ISO. I'm generally shooting with the flash over compensated by a touch anyway. However for these shots, because I was using ETTL and the flash wanted to power down due to the white paper, I increased the flash compensation up by quite a bit (similar to shooting in snow with exp. compensation).

Have a look at my Honey feeding shots for similar images albeit not with spider eating live prey :)

Cheers