Male Pilipes

Nephila pilipes is the largest and most impressive of the spiders that I see here in Indonesia. If you look the species up on the web, you will read that the body length of the female reaches 50mm, a leg span of 200mm and is one of the world’s largest spiders. It also builds one of the world’s largest webs. I have seen webs spanning 8m across streams, webs the size of your front door are common.

However, all these impressive specifications only apply to the female and if you switch your search to images, 95% of what you’ll find will be images of the impressive female. The male of the species tends to miss the limelight due to its diminutive size, reaching a length of around 6mm, a mere 500th of the mass of the female.

This massive size difference is fairly common amongst the aranae or web-building spiders although usually not as pronounced as in nephila, but the less flamboyant males tend to get overlooked. So, this year it is one of my challenges to photograph more males when I can positively identify them on the female’s web.

Because of the lack of media coverage of the males, they are very difficult to identify, as these species are strongly sexually dimorphic, meaning that the two sexes look very different, not only in size but coloration too. The only conclusive way to identify the male is to see the male during actual mating. Photographing the male on the female’s web is not 100% as the males have been documented by science as occasionally making mistakes. My aim is to photograph as many males as possible in the female webs, for future comparison and be able to eliminate the occasional stray male.

So, today’s blip is an extreme macro of a male pilipes, photographed in the web of a female.

Dave