Now you can. It’s pretty amazing how much silk she can produce so quickly.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Now you can. It’s pretty amazing how much silk she can produce so quickly.
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Impressive legwork!
I can’t help but mention that I believe that I’m watching something which is wrong here. I would definitely feel much more comfortable in a natural order where creatures don’t devour each other so cruelly.
Bioengineering might make it possible one day. If our civilisation survives, who knows where the limits of our capabilities will lie?
I get the squeamishness about nature being red in tooth and claw, but I really don’t think we’ll ever get to the point we can re-engineer the whole food web to be nicer. I think we just have to accept that the universe’s indifference creates cruel circumstances we can’t entirely correct or mitigate.
When I played Magic, I was a fan of the Simic Conclave and how they were trying to fix Ravnica’s ecology with weird Krasis (chimerical hybrid creatures), but hubris was a big problem they faced. If we do get some kind of miraculous biopunk future, we’d better be damn careful with how we implement it.
She really is beautiful, and the amount of silk she produced is impressive. Did she let the other meal worm live or go back for it?
Thanks PZ.
As PZ says “a shipping tape dispenser in her butt”. Cool stuff.
I’ve one of these spinybacked orbweavers webbed up in my yard (it’s yard?):
https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/IN324
Stunningly ornate. Probably check on it from time to time.
As for two prey items, I recall throwing two pinkies in with my speckled king and it had one constricted while swallowing the other. The spider seemed to ignore the other meal worm.
We used to do that as children, back when I was very young.
Catch a fly, throw it into the web, watch the activity.
(IIRC, we were cruel, because we were children)
John Morales @7
If you feed a carnivorous pet commercially available pet food (kibble for instance), the cruelty is outsourced.
I hand fed live fish and frogs to a pet ribbon snake decades ago. I am pure evil.
OTOH I had pet mice years before the king snake and felt too connected to do such a thing to them.
In retrospect, I hate to attribute a sense of joy to a snake, but the excitement my ribbon snake exhibited when it saw me carrying a bag of swimming feeder fish was unbounded. Very close to my dog’s reaction to a Paul Newman (pbuh) treats bag being opened or pulling her bed pad pillow warm and fresh from the dryer, and she had far more brain matter to process than the snake.
Not sure you can get those vibes from a spider. Maybe?
from the size of their webs and the strength of the silk I’m guessing they do not normally eat many meal worms but much larger prey like grasshoppers and butterflies .
some thoughts about eating and food. We eat other animals, as do other animals, animals eat plants sometimes utterly destroying them. Plants grow continuously according to season,.
a wheat field or corn or soybean field as are most farm fields are deliberately limited to one life form no other plants are allowed and very few animals as well everything else is killed relentlessly.
there is no way to get around that. The primary energy source is the Nuclear Fusion in our star that energy is used by plants for the processes of life growth and reproduction with a byproduct of free O2 that the animals need for their processes as well as the plants themselves.
the only way to eliminate that is to kill most of the living things on earth and to stop it without killing everything would produce the same result for the vast majority anyway. changed to a more or less static and impoverished diminished environment
The cruelty exists in the human mind in deed and perception.
The spider does not hate the prey it just kills it and eats it with all the reverence it can muster as does the Leopard in its own way.
@ 7 Morales
No dude, you were cruel because you were taught cruelty and you went along with it because you were children.
(Although now you’re an old man the passion for cruelty hasn’t actually abated has it dude.)
@ 2 drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler
The entire concept of cruelty is a human invention. I mean literally, it only exists in human cognition. You think of cruelty as something that exists apart from humans, but that is nonsense. You may as well think of the pecking order of chickens as a thing that would exist in a universe with no chickens.
I threw a red wasp into one of the Argiope aurantia’s web and she promptly cut it free. They can do that pretty fast too. Maybe she wasn’t hungry enough to take on such a capable opponent. I observed this among the large population of Cellar spiders in my house as well. A large cockroach tore right thru a well fed cellar spider’s web, yet was caught by a hungry one nearby. The hungrier the spider, the stickier the web. Have you observed this among your Black widows?
Mealworms aren’t prey, but you make a great waiter! I’m pretty sure she’d give you five-stars for such service!
Cruelty is the wrong word, makes them sound like ice-agents.
An orch guard meeting Shelob…
Silentbob @11:
Coming from a malicious clown like you, that is hilarious. Your malice is only matched by your utter cluelessness.
df @11
There went my last irony meter.
残念ね。