To Pot or Not!

摘要

I have had a passionate interest in spiders since being a young girl in the 1950s and reading Crompton's Life of the spider. My jars of spiders were kept hidden in my bedroom as my love for them was not shared by my school-mates! I progressed to HenriFabre with his Narbonne Lycosa and Banded Epeira without knowing exactly what they were and then Bristowe's World of Spiders which became my Bible. The advent of digital photography and computers has, of course, opened up a whole new world. Not only canthe images be enlarged to see finer details to make classification easier - well a bit easier - but all of the location information can be stored. I have my favourites, but I find all of the species quite enchanting and cannot imagine how anyone, even in the name of science, would want to kill them. Who could pickle something as endearing as this little Heliophanus sitting on the end of my finger with her dinner (Fig. 1)? There must be others out there who are a little overawed at the very scientific articles published and would prefer to 'Squat and Snap' rather than 'Poot and Pickle'. If anyone is interested in a more leisurely spider shoot please let me know.