Hanging on
by Lorna Taylor
Found this little guy hanging on for dear life in a field. I think he had held on all night like this as there is a little wisp of a spiders web on his renaming antenna.
Have been making up for 2 months lost photo time while recovering and spend 31 hours this weekend traveling the back roads of the Edmonton area photographing abandoned houses and barns and the likes. Have a lot of editing ahead of me for when the winter months set in.
1/400 sec, f4.5 , ISO200, 70-300mmlens ,hand held, polarizer, no edits other than bumped the blacks
Comments
4 commentsNice title .. so looks like its hanging on tight. Love the bg also. A pretty image.
I'm afraid it's a rather sad tale. They are infected with a nasty fungus in the Entomophaga grylli species complex. It literally reprograms their little brains, and makes them climb to the top of a bush or branch, grab it in that death-grip , and die as the fungus erupts from their bodies and rains down spores on the next victims from above. What I photographed is literally the corpse of a mind-controlled zombie egg factory and distribution system. !This is a good example of a density-dependent mortality mechanism that can control population explosions of these things. Poor little thing