How nice. The mother of these spiderlings lies back and lets her babies eat her.
Not so nice: the spiderlings then gang up and cannibalize all the other adult spiders in the colony. Hooligans! These kids, always getting into trouble.
Which reminds me…I have to go into the lab this morning and sort out a couple of egg sacs I expect to see hatching out. The species I work with don’t practice matriphagy, but I do like to set up the young’uns with a lot of flies early on.
Isn’t that the same with octop[i or are the mothers already dead when the young emerge?
Let’s eat, mom! v. Let’s eat mom!
Sadly, what PZ witnessed: the mass murdering of their own kind, if not the outright cannibalism of those spiders, is not too dissimilar to human societal behavior as we observe.
Based on decades of personal experience and recorded observation of human behavior, we have, for years, posited that human society is generally a terrible failure: greedy, destructive, murderous, etc. There are some important devastating groupings of humans that are responsible for much of the death and destruction inherent in human society. They are personal and organized selfishness and hatred as manifest in religion, crapitallism, racism, political chauvinism, etc.
This ‘comic’ points out the gross failure of human society succinctly:
https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/3187.png
My organization is not wealthy or powerful, but, we speak and act in ways that attempt to negate much of those failures of society. I’m going to carefully climb down off this soapbox and get back to work at efforts that are positive, progressive, secular and caring.
Be careful, PZ, I don’t want to hear you ended up on the menu at your spider lab.
Ah, the miracle of life!
And owlbears! #unexpectedBG3