The Flying Saucer At Sunset

Lenticular clouds (Altocumulus lenticularis) are stationary lens-shaped clouds with a smooth layered appearance that form in the troposphere, usually above mountain ranges. One was spotted in Singapore recently...

Eyes Of 30,000 Honeycombs

With 30,000 individual facets, dragonflies have the most number of facets among insects. Each facet, or ommatidia, creates its own image, and the dragonfly brain has eight pairs of descending visual neurons to compile those thousands of images into one picture...

A Kaleidoscope Of Colours, Shapes And Patterns

Spectacular and innovative in design, the Flower Dome replicates the cool-dry climate of Mediterranean regions like South Africa, California and parts of Spain and Italy. Home to a collection of plants from deserts all over the world, it showcases the adaptations of plants to arid environments...

Lightning Strikes, Not Once, But Many Times

Unlike light, lightning does not travel in a straight line. Instead, it has many branches. These other branches flashed at the same time as the main strike. The branches are actually the step leaders that were connected to the leader that made it to its target...

Are You My Dinner Tonight?

A T-Rex has 24-26 teeth on its upper jaw and 24 more on its lower jaw. Juveniles have small, sharp blade-shaped teeth to cut flesh, whereas adults have huge, blunt, rounded teeth for crushing bones. Is the T-Rex a bone-crushing scavenger?

Eastern Twilight Surprises

2:28 AM  , , , , , , , , , ,  

Tampines
East, Singapore
February 2013

The visit at twilight was full of little surprises...
  • A Tetragnathidae (Big-Jawed Spider) silhouetted against the rays of the setting sun...

  • A blob of unknown origin...
  • A bright-hued grasshopper...
  • A freckled one...
  • And a moulted one...
  • A bright Ampittia Dioscorides Camertes (Bush Hopper)...
  • Ant burrows in little hills that go deep underground...
  • A plant that appeared to have branches twirled from wires...
  • A Neoscona Nautica (Brown Sailor Spider) quietly hiding in the leaf to await sunset...
  • And a very photogenic Thomisus Stoliczka (Stoliczka's Crab Spider)...


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The Dusk Web Builder

12:40 AM  , , , , , ,  

Tampines
East, Singapore
February 2013

When the sun descends below the horizon, the world slowly turns from twilight to dusk. At a park Tampines, a place with no electrical lighting, it is when the grass and marsh darkens. The world there then comes alive with lots of "Eastern Twilight Surprises"...

Twilight is also the time when nocturnal spiders awake from their daytime positions inside leaves, inside burrows, on webs, and come alive to repair their webs for a night of food gathering.

The Neoscona Rufofemorata (Brown-Legged Spider) is one such nocturnal spider. During the day, it sits still on a leaf, indistinguishable as a spider because of its yoga-like folded legs. In the evening, it awakens and starts building its web.

To show how big it really is when it finally unfolds itself...

Using leaves or branches as anchors, the Neoscona starts by creating the outermost layer of the orb web. The web is built in a circular manner, round and round, and round. Here we see one at work in its fascinating display of Nature's Art...

Good reason why it needs all of its 8 legs to build a good web...

How the finished web looks like...


The full albums are available at:

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