As far as I knew, I hadn't seen a Mecynogea lemniscata in years. Then, four days ago, I saw one. I returned the next day to examine the web again. It's so delicate that it's difficult to make out details unless the lighting conditions are just so. After that second examination, I knew there was something odd about the construction of that dome. It looked like a regular grid of tiny squares, rather than the series of irregularly sized trapezoids that characterize an orb web*.
Later that day I found another specimen with an amazing web in excellent lighting, and the shots I got just made me more curious. How the heck is that dome constructed? It can't be a regular grid, because the rows seem to follow a radial arrangement. Moving out from the center, the number of squares in each ring has to increase.
Well, today I found dozens more of the same species, and I finally got some shots with enough detail to answer the question of its construction. I cropped two images and circled the spots where one radial row becomes two, two become three, etc. I don't know anything about knitting, but my wife tells me the spider does the same thing a knitter does.
The pictures above show only a section of the dome, and the dome is only one component of an intricate and varied structure. For the last few days I've been wondering if I could shoot a video that would convey that astonishing complexity. Those new specimens gave me the opportunity to do just that.
I managed to approximate the act of examining a Mecynogea lemniscata web in this video. No one photograph or illustration can convey its intricacy. There must be thousands of strands, and the different sections of the web have wildly different types of construction. To take it in, you have to let your eyes range over it, here stepping back to take in the whole thing, there focusing on a few square millimeters. I played with the focus here to simulate that.
*An orb web is just the traditional Halloween web, with radial spokes and concentric rings.
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