David Attenborough on the individual characters of tiny creatures

    David Attenborough has seen the individual characters of tiny creatures. Of tiny bola spiders he writes in his book, Life in the Undergrowth:

When we were filming . . . we had in front of us a line of bottles, each of which supported a spray of leafy twigs in which crouched a small bola spider. These tiny creatures catch moths by whirling a filament of silk with a sticky blob at the end, whenever one came near them. Kevin Fleay, the cameraman, had been working with them for nearly a week and he introduced them to me individually. This one, he told me, was very shy. The slightest vibration made her draw up her legs and stay motionless no matter how near a moth came. That one reacted in the same way if the light was too bright. A third didn’t seem to mind how much light was shone on her but on the other hand she was unpredictable. Sometimes she would hunt and sometimes not. But the one at the end of the line, no matter how much she had eaten, or how much light shone on her, would whirl her bolas whenever a moth came anywhere near and usually caught her prey. These tiny creatures half the size of my fingernail each had individual characters.
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    For a brief biography of David Attenborough, click here.