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The one who didn't get away. A male Nephilengys malabarensis
snapped off his genitals (red box) in the female, but it was eaten anyway.
I suppose it's better to snap off your genitals rather than be devoured by your partner after mating, but it's not that much better. Here's a solution that the male orb-weaver spider Nephilengys malabarensis developed to increase its chance of survival after mating with a cannibalistic female:
Daiqin Li at the National University of Singapore and his colleagues studied the species and found that after the male breaks away his severed organ continues to pump sperm into the female. This allows him to fertilize her remotely, while denying entry to other males. Even though the male cannot regrow his genitals and so renders himself sterile, he increases the odds that he will father the offspring of his one and only mate. [...]
Li thinks that this bizarre strategy, found in only two spider families so far, evolved to counter the female’s penchant for cannibalism. “The females are very aggressive and 75% of them kill the males during sex,” he explains. “The duration of copulation is also very short, and the females initiate the break-off.”
Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits
Do you see anything strange in the picture above? Here’s a hint, it’s not just a tree… yup, there’s a spider in there too. Don’t miss the rest of the great camouflaged creatures in the gallery over at BuzzFeed.
This spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois looks big enough to swallow Spider Man whole, and probably should gobble up the webslinger for being such an attention monger!
Christie’s auction house decided to unveil their newest acquisition by hiring Craig Henningsen, star of Spider Man the Musical, to commemorate the occasion with some web-headed antics. The piece is the second largest spider sculpture in the world, and is expected to sell for over 4 million dollars.
Get it? No? Just think about it a little …
See more of Doug Savage’s excellent Savage Chickens web comic at his website.
A national education program being carried out right now on the International Space Station involves watching the behavior or animals and insects in microgravity. This video is of Esmerelda, a golden silk orb-weaver spider (Nephila clavipes), weaving a web in her new low-gravity home. Typically, an orb-weaver will spin an asymmetrical web, but researchers have noticed that those spun by the two spiders on the ISS are becoming more circular. In addition, the spiders no longer sit at the tops of their webs facing downwards, and are instead hanging out in all sorts of positions to look out for their captured prey–something that doesn’t happen here on Earth.
Read more about the experiment and the oddities in Esmeralda’s behavior on New Scientist. Link
The German-based production team know as Polynoid is a collaboration of Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, Csaba Letay, Fabian Pross and Tom Weber, all design, music and storytelling geniuses. This 5-minute film, Loom, took one year to create.
It’s creepy but oddly mesmerizing. If you’re an arachnophobe, this might not be the best animation for you. But I watched it and, rather than being terrified, I was awed. The only time I really squicked was in the spinneret shot near the end.
A jumping spider’s mating dance only needs the proper music to make it perfect! You can find out more about the spider and see the original video at NPR. Link -via Arbroath
The fossil itself is not as big as this picture.
The spider, a new species called Nephila jurassica, stretches about two inches from end to end. It was found in a fossil-rich rock formation near Daohugou village in northeastern China. The fossil dates back to the Middle Jurassic, about 165 million years ago, researchers reported in the April 20 Biology Letters.
Spiders from the same family still exist today. Female giant golden orb-weaver spiders can grow to a whopping 4 or 5 inches in diameter (although males tend to be less than a quarter that size). These spiders are known for spinning huge webs of golden silk and have been known to trap bats and small birds.
Spider fossils are very rare, and this discovery leads scientists to believe that the Nephila genus is 130 million years older than previously thought. Link
(Image credit: Paul Selden)
We’ve posted about the tiny Australian Peacock Spider before, but now you can see its amazing mating dance. A couple of minutes into this video, you’ll understand how it got its name. Read more about this spider at Catalyst. Link -via The Daily What
Hipsters may consider dogboarding to be way cooler than horseboarding, but both pale in comparizon to “spider-boarding” – a technique that has been used by mantidfly larvae for millions of years.
The larvae of most mantidfly species are fussy diners – they only eat the eggs of spiders. That seems like a dangerous enough strategy, for spiders are formidable hunters. But it gets crazier – some mantidflies find spider egg sacs by hitching a ride on the backs of adults… The “spider-boarders” can’t chew through the egg sacs. Instead, they ensure that they get inside the sac as it is being built. They climb aboard passing females, wrapping themselves around the base of their abdomens so they can’t be caught.
The photo above, by Michael Ohl of Berlin’s Museum of Natural History, shows a spider embedded in a 44 million year old piece of amber. “And there, latched onto its underside just as its modern relatives do, is a mantidfly larva… it’s facing to the right and you can clearly see the three legs on its right side.”
Additional details (and a photo of an adult mantid-like mantidfly) available at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Link.
The cargo ship M.V. Altavia began to offload cargo in the U.S. territory of Guam when thousands of spiders of different species emerged from the cargo! Stevedores immediately refused to bring anything else off the ship. The offloaded cargo was returned to the ship, which was ordered out of dock.
Agriculture officials said they didn’t know what type of spiders were on the ship. But they said it’s a type that is not normally found on Guam and there was concern the spiders could damage the island’s environment.
“It’s not on Guam,” Torres said. “We don’t want it here.”
The ship was carrying housing units and accessories that were to be used at a work force village expected to house up to 18,000 temporary workers.
The M.V. Altavia had most recently ported in South Korea. The ship was told not to return to Guam. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Jason A. Samfield)
[YouTube - Link]
The Mondo Spider, a badass mechanical arachnid originally devised by a couple guys in their garage in preparation for Burningman, has gotten a full makeover. The machine still doesn’t seem incredibly efficient, but who cares? It’s a 1,700 lb driveable robot spider…
See our report on the original incarnation of this fantastic beast here.
Via UniqueDaily
The Huntsman spider, common in Australia, aren’t as deadly as they look, but will bite if provoked. In this video, “Daddy” does his best to safely remove the arachnid from his home. His daughter has some choice words for him afterwards.
-via Bits & Pieces
Photo: Jurgen Otto
This is a kind of jumping spider, and it’s only about 5mm in size. The males have a colorful pattern on flaps that extend from their abdomen during breeding/mating. In addition to this, they raise their back pair of legs and dance from side to side to win over their plain brown females.
Only found in Australia, they were classified as species Maratus volans because people originally thought the flap was for gliding after jumping. Wiki
A new species of golden orb spider has been found in South Africa. It is the biggest spider ever found that spins a web -and what a web it is!
The female of the new species of golden orb weaver spider has a body one and a half inches long with a leg span of five inches and weaves a web more than three feet wide.
The tiny male, however, has a leg span of just one inch. The variation of the Nephila species, named as Nephila Komaci, was discovered by US and Slovenian researchers in Africa and Madagascar
Nephila Komaci has a limited range and is believed to be an endangered species. Link -via Unique Daily
There are some 40,000 known species of spiders, but every single one of them is thought to be carnivorous … except this one. The Bagheera Kiplingi jumping spider of Central and South America is the first spider found to have an almost exclusively vegetarian diet. These spiders live and feast on the protein packed tips of the acacia tree leaves.
But to reach this leafy fare, the spider has to evade the attention of ants, which live in the hollow spines of the tree.
“But when they get hungry, the spiders head to the newer leaves, and get ready to run the ant gauntlet. And they wait for an opening – they watch the ants move around, and they watch to see that there are not any ants in the local area that they are going after.”
“And then they zip in and grab one of these Beltian bodies and then clip it off, hold it in their mouths and run away. “
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by coconutnut.
The largest piece of cloth ever made from spider silk measures four feet wide and eleven feet long. To make it, 70 people collected golden orb spiders over four years! The spiders were then hooked up to a machine that extracted the silk from the spiders without harming them, in a project headed by Nicholas Godley and textile expert Simon Peers.
To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”
By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June.
Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”
The resulting cloth is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Link
German arachnologist Peter Jaeger has discovered 200 species of spiders in the past decade. Now he has named one of his finds after singer David Bowie. The new species, a large yellow spider in Malaysia, is called Heteropoda davidbowie. Jaeger said he named the spider to draw attention to the discovery, and to the endangered status of many spiders.
“It is working against time,” he said. “We are also quickly losing genetic resources that have evolved over more than 300 million years.”
Bowie had a 1972 album entitled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His 1987 tour was named the Glass Spider Tour. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Senckenberg Forschungsinstitute/Naturmuseen)
Ever wish that itsy bitsy crab you had for dinner were bigger, so that you could eat more of one instead of ordering another dish? Why not order a coconut crab, a Tasmanian giant crab or a Japanese spider crab? Who knows, with 13 ft of crab to deal with, you might not even be able to finish it all!
(Also available: escargot So big, you can’t even wrap your hands around it.)
This article over at Cracked also features jellyfish, spiders, worms and other creepy crawlies you would love to see magnified.
Puppies, kittens, infants: All adorable. And do you know why? Because they’re tiny. If you start to magnify these things, then you wind up with the substantially less cute wolves, jaguars and teenagers.
Yes, if there’s one thing nature teaches us, it’s that what may start out as an adorable little animal friend can quickly turn into a Lovecraftian horror when its itty-bitty wittle mouth gets big enough to start eating your face. And when the little versions are already a little bit creepy, the big versions are the stuff nightmares are made of.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Silver.
When travelling down a sand dune, the Saharan rolling spider (Araneus rota) is capable of rolling on its outstretched legs, achieving speeds of over 4 mph. It looks "like a small, unusually fast tumbleweed."
– via spiegel
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
French Performance Art outfit La Machine unveiled this 3 million dollar steampunk spider, La Princesse, as part of the City of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture.
Over a four day period, La Princesse – in search of a nest – climbed walls, stalked the streets and sprayed unwary citizens. This huge construction (here seen in some wonderful pictures) was deemed a huge success – but possibly not by any resident arachnaphobes.
This is in fact a massive thirty six tonne hydraulic spider scaling the side of a city block in Liverpool, England. The city is of course best known for The Beatles. However, during its time as the European City of Culture visitors to one of its main railway stations, Lime Street, could have been forgiven for thinking that the city had been invaded by a different type of insect altogether.
Link – via webphemera
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.
