Congratulations – you’ve made it through the whole week, and are now ready for SPIDERDAY! Some Arachnological finds from the past week:

First, amazing image of a developing spider:

Yes, they are adorable. (also, Cthulhu)

• Of, you know, it’s just wolf spiders singing and purring. Terrific research, and FTW, this site also has sound files!
• Spiders and Lego. Is there anything better? Wonderful post and really neat experiment!
• Wow – some amazing natural history here about a parasitoid wasp that affects a spider so that the web architecture is modified.
• Why are we so afraid of spiders? (A re-post of a re-post…the original is here)
• On the taxonomy side, here’s a revision of ant-mimicking spiders from the western Pacific. They are *very* nifty spiders.
• An important paper for spider taxonomists: Resolving the phylogeny of the Linyphiidae.
• The Velvet spiders: high society. 
• Spiders raining down on Australia: this story got a lot of press last week. Ballooning spiders really are wonderful, and although “mass ballooning” events may not be that common, they are natural!

A quick sketch of what it looks like when a spider “takes off” by ballooning.

• Surprise! Jumping spiders see more colours that you can…  (actually, I’m not that surprised)
• Congratulations to Arachnologist Dr. Maggy Hardy for being the “@RealScientists” this past week. She did a great job tweeting about SO many wonderful things, including arachnids.
• Spider-themed paper is the Presidential Award Winner (best paper from 2014) from the American Society of Naturalists.
• Arlo Pelegrin posted another great tweet showing more great spidery anatomy.
• First record of the Pseudoscorpion family Cheiridiidae from Iran.
• The brown dog tick has become resistant to permethrin: bad news for dog owners (um, and not great for dogs, either)
• You just don’t hear enough about Uropygids (whip scorpions). Here’s an overview of the Thelyphoninae.
• The top ten species were unveiled. A spider, of course, was among this list: the fabulous ‘cartwheeling’ spider… here’s a video of that species:

© C.M. Buddle (2015)