In 'Spiders,’ Nic Bishop gets tangled up with some amazing creatures

You’ve made a career of photographing and writing about small animals worldwide. What were you like as a boy?

If you look at my early school reports, they always say, “He can do better. He seems to daydream a lot in class.” I remember being switched off through most classes and looking out the window and wishing I was outside exploring.

Your mother was a medical researcher, and your father worked as a biology teacher for the British Council. Where did you grow up?

When I was three years old, we lived in Bangladesh, and when I was about nine or 10, we lived in the Sudan, in Africa. Then between the ages of 14 and 18, we were in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and I did a lot of hiking into remote places to look for birds of paradise. That’s where my interest in biology really took off.

Is that when you became interested in spiders?

Yeah. As part of my homeschooling, I studied this spider in the garden for several months. It was a fairly common spider up there, but nobody had really studied it and nobody knew what the male spider looked like. So I discovered the male, which is about 100 times smaller than the female. So I did this whole study; it’s just amazing how complicated these animals are. I even did a little bit of photography. It wasn’t particularly good. I had an old, secondhand Minolta Rangefinder camera. That’s actually the first close-up work I did, photographing a tiny male mating with this huge, gargantuan female.

You took some amazing close-ups for this book.

One of the pictures that took quite a long time to take was the one of a tarantula shedding its skin.

I remember looking at that image and thinking, “How did he ever get that shot?”

An adult tarantula molts once a year, and it takes a couple of hours. They tend to molt in burrows, several feet underground. You can’t photograph that in nature, unless you’re constantly digging up their burrows, which isn’t really fair to tarantulas.

What did you do?

I kept several tarantulas, and I had to constantly look in on them. You get some idea of when they’re going to shed their skins because they lose their appetites. But you can never predict exactly when. I’d go to the store and come back, and there’d be the tarantula with this old, discarded skin, looking proud of it. Or else they would molt in the middle of the night, and I’d miss it. I had 11 tarantulas, and I missed the first five molting.

That must’ve drove you nuts.

After three or four months of watching them every few hours, I saw one start to shed its skin. So I removed it from its enclosure and put it in front of the flashlights. It’s not like I can say, “OK, now I’ll set up my lights.” That might take two hours to do. So I have to have a setup waiting for this thing for months. Once they start molting, the new skin is very soft. It’s like picking up a wet rag. So you have to pick up the spider very carefully. When I finally get a picture like that picture in the book, and I can see every tiny little hair on the spider, I get very excited about the level of textural detail.

What does your wife think about your work?

Fortunately, she’s a biologist, too. That helps. She’s a microbiologist, so she deals more with bacteria and things. But she’s fairly house proud and likes the place tidy and organized. So I tend to keep my stuff in my studio. She has a good sense of humor about my work, because you never know what you’re going to find. If you open a jar on the kitchen counter, it could be full of mayonnaise… or it could just have a spider in it.