This is a picture of a Sheet Weaver Spider at 5x magnification using reflected light and focus stacking. It was taken by Geir Grange of Norway and depicts some sort of larva on the abdomen of this spider. It Immediately interested me because they somehow were able to make the spider look almost transparent and I've aways been very interested in what it looks like inside of certain creatures. I also never really see pictures of spiders this close up and I find it very interesting. This photo does raise some questions however, like why is there a larva on the spider's abdomen? Also I wonder how they made this Spider look transparent in the picture above, can they make the larva look transparent as well?. After doing some research I found out that the reason why this parasitic wasp larva is on the spider is because it is a parasitoid and will spend much of it's life on this spider. This Parasitoid will eventually kill or sterilize this spider. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid_wasp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid).
This is a really interesting picture and most of your questions were similar to mine. I really like how we are able to see the inside of the spider because I always wonder what the inside of animals looks like. You did a good job of defining and describing what certain things were like the parasitoid.
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