i’m reading a book on spider biology and here’s some things i’ve learnt so far
they can’t move their eyes so when they need to focus on something they move their retinas independently of the rest of the eye instead and i can’t precisely pinpoint why this creeps me out but it does
i mean just look at that
they have two main eyes and the rest are secondary
which deeply upsets me because there’s quite a few six-eyed spiders and this wasn’t weird when it was just going from a larger number to an arbitrary smaller number, but knowing that they’ve got six because they decided to jettison their main eyes and run on backups is much much weirder
wolf spiders have the best goofy little monster faces. this isn’t
strictly
a biology fact but it’s still true
big spiders have 30-40 heartbeats per minute and lil dudes can have up to 100
their arteries run from the heart, into the chest, and down their legs, and then they open up and dump their blood in their feet. just right in there. let it slosh around. that’s all you need from a circulatory system, right.
their blood sloshes around and eventually winds up at the lowest point of their bodies, where their lungs slurp up all that loose blood and shove it back into the heart
instead of being made in bone marrow or anything, their blood cells just bud directly off of the heart muscle into the bloodstream
they can taste with their feet but not their mouths
god spiders are weird
thanks to this post i just looked up spider anatomy on wikipedia (actually i did a search for “spider organs” on duckduckgo and that’s what came up first) and it was even weirder than i imagined, their heart looks like WHAT? and did i misunderstand the diagram or do they have intestines running down all their legs? anyway a+++ would recommend
i get the gist that if there’s something that makes you go “that can’t be right” wrt spiders, it absolutely is right
mgd is midgut branches and lmao yep they poke down into the leg segments sometimes (or, as in friend jumping spider in fig b, up surrounding the eyes…….)
there’s so much happening inside spiders, who authorised this
Most arthropods have /hilarious/ circulatory systems because a significant chunk of it is “toss the organs in a pool of oxygen enriched blood and hope that works out”
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 this
Im tempted to do a “long island suburban gothic” but i know it would be less horror and more “oh look i found a spider oh look i killed it and it turned into two separate live spiders how fucking cool is that???” so
only two? what kind of weak-ass wolf spiders you got up there?
DarkestElemental616 