Welcome to the second edition of Spiderday! (here’s the first one): a weekly round-up of neat stories about Arachnids.
First up, an amazing shot of fishing spider, from Nash Turley!
A Pisauridae spider, photo by Nash Turley (reproduced here with permission)
- Greg Laden provides a terrific review of Rick Vetter’s book about brown recluse spiders. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR!
- Hey hey hey… ever want to go to camp? How about “spider camp” - great opportunity at the Sierra Nevada Field Campus of SF State. That camp would be a great step towards becoming an Arachnologist.
- From Catherine Scott: Sex pheromone on the silk of black widow females: it’s complicated! (That’s some terrific research blogging)
- Two lovely Arachnid-themed natural history posts by students at University of Northern British Columbia (directed by Staffan Lindgren): one on the diving bell spider, and another on how a Tarantula and a frog share some space.
- Gotta love Twitter: check out this visualization of getting a spider identification done over Twitter:
- For the morphologists among us: Book lung development in Parasteatoda tepidariorum
- Here’s a great-looking paper on the interactive effects of fire and large herbivores on web-building spiders.
- The stuff of comic books: spiders sprayed with Graphene (carbon nano-materials) had super-strong silk. Wow.
- Let’s not forget about the other Arachnid Orders: here’s a terrific post about when Scorpions spray their venom, with a simply outstanding (and short) video.
- How do little wee tiny arachnid babies stay on their mother’s back? Don’t worry, science has worked some of that out.
- On the backs of wasps you just might find some mites. Cool critters hangin’ on.
- Speaking of mites: they are on your face. It’s true - mites are on our faces and in our hair follicles. It’s normal, and pretty darn awesome.
- The great Arachnologist Joseph Lapp posted some videos on his website. Here’s one about giant spider webs in Texas:
