From (The Spider Shop) an entire small bathroom as a whipspider habitat is such an amazing aesthetic concept and I’m sure they love it when the lights are out and there’s no humans bothering them, HOWEVER I’d be so worried about them getting hurt or lost when the door is opened and it looks like the toilet is still used by people?!
I don’t know how they’re clinging to those tile walls either, my one can’t climb anything smoother than bare rough brick.
Oh yeah you might notice how they’re arranged really evenly on that wall, too – that’s actually how they live in the wild!
They inhabit caves, hollow trees or sheer rock walls in the tropics, and will spend most of their time just sitting in one spot, slowly slowly waving their ultra-long “whips” (legs modified into feelers) all around themselves in a circle to search for any passing prey.
If they feel the whip of a fellow spider they will move just out of their way, so they all end up exactly at “arm’s length” from one another in a sort of loose grid or checkerboard of little hunting spots.
It’s almost like a perfect video game setup. If you’re an insect lost in a whipspider cave, you’ve got to navigate this minefield of nearly blind predators whose huge long skinny arms are just constantly, silently circling in search of YOU!
Not a lot of things they eat are really smart enough to last very long that way.
Actually even if they were smart this is still the setup they’re dealing with:
WAIT ANOTHER THING I FORGOT
So they live in total darkness, and most of their prey, like cockroaches, rely entirely on touch to navigate that environment.
So, the prey feels something brushing it in the dark, something little and light, just the tip of something, no big deal….and has an instinct to just move AWAY from that thing, right? Problem solved?! But since the arms reach around so far, it often means a situation like this:
….And if the prey doesn’t just blindly march straight into its mouth from there, the whipspider will do this:
It doesn’t need to pounce or chase. The prey doesn’t have a direction to go where it won’t bump into one of the arms, turn around, and try to go a different way, like a roomba, as the arms slowly close in and shrink that corral more and more towards the predator’s jaws!
I know it’s the dead of winter but your assignment today is to find a bug and send me a picture of it
or tell me a bug story
I will accept bug stories as acceptable substitutes
I have a folder on my phone because I keep snapping pics of bugs in odd places and then needing to find them again later.
Anyway, this is from last December, but it was still hilarious to me
I get in to work and there was this cup, just sat there and I’m like dude it was one extra push into the bin
And I get closer and understand a little better since I guess they couldn’t deal with it right away, but didn’t want to throw a bunch of liquid into the trash
Then I see it
This little guy
Unfortunately it couldn’t stay there and we had to throw it outside where it was literally icy on the parking lot so I don’t think it survived 😦
The assignment: Shanna can’t stop laughing as she describes
this album cover for me and I am to draw it without seeing it and based
only on her description: “A metalhead with a gun walks around a corner
that isn’t there and is surprised by a giant spider. The spider is
SCREAMING. They float above the ground. They are on the moon. The sky is blue. There are eggs.”
Oh, for sure. Although there is some back and forth between adaptation (traits changing to be useful) and exaptation (existing traits being coopted into new uses) so it’s gonna be pretty variable among spider families.
Leg length is often used as an identification tool: ex “2,4,3,1” ranking leg pairs from longest to shortest.
(Gonna post this so I can add some pictures, hang on)
Just a few examples:
Crab spiders lurk in flowers and ambush their prey, grabbing them with their two long, strong pairs of front legs
Huntsman spiders and wolf spiders chase down their prey and are good at running and leaping
Jumping spiders use their short, muscle-packed legs for loooooong jumps.
Here’s a slender nursery web spider, good at running, whose short middle legs are more an adaptation for its preferred style of camoflage
A lot of people are asking why I’m painting spiders. It’s because I’m currently running an experiment where I have two males, one infected and one healthy, courting one female simultaneously (to see whether she will choose the healthy male over the sick one). I have to mark them with paint to keep track of which male is which. You can see the little paint dots on their back.
I really want to know the outcome
Well I’ve run about 10 trials so far, and I can tell you that anecdotally, the males are more interested in courting each other than in courting the female. Definitely not what I was expecting…
THIS JUST IN: gay spiders confirmed by science
the science checks out: putting makeup on spiders makes them gay
Yogg-Sarongurt 