This is an enlarged image of a spider photographed in Big Bend. I have enhanced it with special effects in order to simulate the use of my flashlight in discovering the spider. What originally drew my attention to this little guy (or gal) was a bright, neon-green dot that reflected the beam of my flashlight.
A brief web search turned up a Wolf Spider which, for the most part, seems to fit the image above. Wolf Spiders, of which there seems to be more than 2000 kinds, forage for insects and may—depending on the species—build trap doors to catch their food as well as webs strictly for resting and shelter. Apparently they aren’t particularly venomous and have highly reflective eyes that make them easy to find at night (and that explains that, I thought to myself).
Wolf Spiders are supposed to have a number of eyes and in the image above you can clearly see a dark right eye that matched a dark left eye that I saw on the night of this encounter. Even in the original image that I have, there are other areas near the right eye that might be additional eyes. But it was the “orb-like” appendage on its head—between the two obvious eyes—that reflected green (and which appears almost white under the unrelenting electronic flash (see the previous image in this gallery).
At the time there in Big Bend I looked at the spider from various angles and took a number of unremarkable photographs that I’ve since discarded. Wolf Spider or not, this creepy-crawly seemed to have had only the single physical attribute reflecting light. Perhaps this green eyed monster is a Cyclops of sorts.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 639 KB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.