hello i have learnt more spider facts
- spiders will pull their own legs clean off if they get damaged because most of them can regrow legs during molting, which explains why you often see spiders missing a leg but never any missing half a leg?
- some remarkably distressing scientists proved this by getting a spider to pull off all of its legs and then feeding its limbless torso for months until it sprouted a full complement of legs again and then hopefully used them to get the fuck out of dodge
- baby spiders don’t get lenses until their first molt and before that they just have baby eyes and while this ought not to be any weirder than the concept of baby teeth, welp,
- there are so many spiders floating around thousands of metres up in the air that they’re described as “aerial plankton”
- The Sky Is Full Of Spiders
- there are spider-parasitising spiders but instead of laying eggs in organs or stealing blood or anything like that they just ride on top of bigger spiders and steal snacks when their mighty steed is eating
- there are ant-mimicking spiders that use their disguises to raid ant nests and w/e but there are also ant mimics that just. hang out. they make fake ant colonies full of fake ants. sometimes the actual ants that they’re mimicking find their house and live with them. stealth 100
- some mother spiders live in communal family nests, where multiple mothers can work together to bring down bigger prey while all their collected babies are cared for by the babysitters
- some mother spiders feed their babies mouth to mouth like birds
- some mother spiders carry their babies around and i was aware of this but not the fact that if you steal their eggsac they’ll freak out and search for it for hours and sometimes end up adopting anything that’s vaguely the right size, they will carry around empty snail shells for weeks and lovingly dote on them…
- guys i am literally about to cry over spider moms
i borrowed the book op cites from the library (biology of spiders by rainer f. foelix) because of this post and my two favourite new spider facts are
-they don’t just have an exoskeleton – they also have a secret partial inside skeleton
and
-you know the guy who gave spiders drugs and took pictures of their fucked up webs? he ended up studying them because his buddy was studying garden spiders and they spin webs at 2-5 am and his buddy was like, Ugh, fuck this, i want to sleep in, do you have anything i can give these spiders to make them spin webs at not two in the morning
-and this guy, A Pharmacologist, was like, hell yea, here are some amphetamines for your spiders
-and all those did was make the spiders spin some exceptionally weird webs at 2-5am
-and i guess his buddy gave up in disgust at these spiders who wouldn’t let him sleep but mr. spider amphetamines was like, you know what, this is cool, i’m gonna keep going with thisPell ur a hero. Wtf