luck's Favorites

Poor pic, better camera to be deployed later.

This guy comes with a story of the location, a large jacuzzi with a house water heater that is too small to fill it to the jet level. The original idea was to use Archimedes' principle to fill the unused areas of the tub with enough rocks to bring the hot water level up to usable.

Rocks were gathered from a woodland hillside, but the mosses covering them were interesting enough to abandon the jacuzzi-use plan and watch what happened with them. Besides moss, I found ants were living in the cavities inside some of the rocks.

Shortly after, I found the spider running on the floor of another bathroom, and transferred it to the tub to be a potential predator against any other critters that came with the rocks.

The spider addition spurred a whole project of habitat improvement: although I provided an escape route, it did not leave even when there was limited moisture and prey. Mission is now to keep the spider alive and happy in the tub. Leaf litter and a pan of water were added to improve humidity when not in use for showering.

Here, the spider is waiting on top of the rocks for flying prey (winter house fly trapped in bathroom). Other times, it camps by the "watering hole".

Found on a wet Ochre Jelly Club mushroom on a rainy day. It was super mobile, as you can see, and lifted itself up and moved around everywhere. I wanted to examine closer but it folded itself into a pretzel and noped right off my hand

Found in a patch of grass. I came back 3 days later with better equipment to get closer photos, but the lawn had been mowed! This is the best I have. Insect eggs? Slime mold?
Another patch with slightly different coloration was found to the right: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/189049148

They chaaaaaanged! See update here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/189371665