Shot with Canon 550D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro, Aputure Amaran AHL-C60. The silk-lined burrow is about fifteen millimeters in diameter. The first clip is real time and the second is the same clip slowed by shooting at 60fps and conforming to 24fps.

Trap-door Spider on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/user4952110/trapdoorspider)

Impressive! How do you find the trapdoor?

Very cool!
Impressive moments you captured.

It was simply luck, Alastair. I watched her building the burrow. Even so, later I absolutely couldn’t see the door at all.

Thanks, Trond.

Cool video but damn that's gross.

That was great, but I think I may step carefully from now on!!!!!! :)

Al

That's awesome!

Glad they are small things!

Impressive catch. It reminds me of a Sci-Fi movie where things like that came up from the ground and grabbed people.

Stephen, do you mean the cult classic "Tremors"?

I should have mentioned that this species of spider is not native here. It was introduced at a nursery in Austin (south of the river) in the 1980’s in a shipment of tropical plants from Africa and spread south from there. For a while they were fairly common in some areas but our recent drought has knocked their population back. We have two species of local trap-door spiders (They are unrelated to each other and to this species. Trap-doors are a type of behaviour widely found among spider taxa.). Both of the native spiders are very uncommon. I last saw one twenty years ago. This spider now lives in a photo terrarium and I hope to get more similar footage with my new high frame rate camera. (I bought the Edgertronic after a DVInfo heads-up from Tim Lewis. Thanks, Tim!) Unfortunately, now that she is well fed, she is rather reluctant to perform under the lights and starving an animal to make it easier to record doesn’t fit well with my philosophy. The waiting game continues…