geekosystem

One of the great things about setting aside land as a sanctuary for one creature is that it helps to preserve a whole ecosystem full of plants and animals -- some of which we may not even know exist yet. Take for example the two new species of spider -- both among the world's tiniest -- that were just discovered on the grounds of a panda sanctuary in southwest China. One of these little guys averages less than a millimeter across. You could eat, like, 50 of them in your sleep and never even know it!

For some species of social spiders, it seems the family that lives together, kills together. A recent study in the journal Animal Behavior shows that young spiders who live with alongside their older siblings grow up big and strong, at least in part because they're dining on the leftovers brought home by their older siblings.

Here's some nightmare fuel you could have gone the rest of your life without knowing: every continent except Antarctica hosts spiders so large, they can trap bats in their webs. That's according to a study released earlier this month in the open-access journal PLOS ONE that records in often gruesome detail 50 incidents of spiders ensnaring bats. In related news, who is moving to Antarctica with me right the hell now?

It's time to add Sri Lanka to the list of places I probably won't ever go, because a new species has been discovered there that's both face-sized and features far too many legs.  The new tarantula is named Poecilotheria rajaeia, belongs to the colorful, venomous tiger spider group, and was discovered lairing in an old hospital. Which in my book turns the creep factor up to 11.

Animals evolve for lots of reasons. Usually to improve methods of finding food, attracting mates, or escaping the notice of predators. We've all done it. Evolved, I mean. One vivid example is the butterfly, the world's most colorful insect. But those vibrant hues and crazy wing patterns were never for our benefit. Nope, they developed to deflect attackers, and we've been assuming since the days of Darwin that the perps were birds. Insect-devouring birds. But it turns out that it was probably the spawn of Ungoliant -- spiders -- who were the villains all this time. And not just any spiders -- jumping spiders! These eight-legged creeps are at least partially responsible for the adaptation of the butterfly.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we mourn the loss of a real hero. With a lump in our throats and a tear in our eye, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History announced that their resident space-traveling red-backed jumping spider, Nefertiti, passed away yesterday, five days after returning from a 100-day and 42-million-mile journey to the International Space Station. We promised ourselves we wouldn't cry, but here come the waterworks.

Invasive species can be bad times pretty much anywhere, but nowhere do they cause so much trouble as an island. In the closed environment of an island, just a couple of out of place animals can utterly transform an entire ecosystem. Invasive brown tree snakes in Guam have devastated populations of native birds that once dined on the island's spiders. With those birds on the ropes, Guam's spiders have taken the run of the place. The result is an arachnid population boom so serious that gaps in the island's tree canopy are now regularly filled with enormous spiderwebs. For every one spider on neighboring islands not afflicted by tree snakes, Guam now hosts up to 40 of the creepy crawlers, turning Guam from a tropical island paradise to a snake and spider dominated horror show right out of every Dungeon Master's dreams.

A study from UCLA suggests that talking about your emotions when you're feeling afraid can lessen the impact of the fear response, proving once and for all that the Bene Gesserits were exactly right about how to deal with fear. As if there were any doubt. In a study of arachnophobes -- people with a perfectly reasonable fear of spiders, because, ugh, those legs -- researchers found that subjects who articulated what they were feeling when they were exposed to a tarantula had less fear of the spider, and were able to get closer to it and touch it more often than others who did not mention their fear of spiders during the experience.

Wildlife photographer Adrián Skippy Purkart captured one of nature's most beautiful moments: Winged male ants having sex with their dying queen while a spider eats her. The ants, Prenolepis nitens, are trying to make sweet, sweet dying love to their queen while she's busy getting eaten because she's still sending out chemical cues for, uh, for that kind of thing to happen. Have a good weekend, you guys!

Spider silk is known for having a high tensile strength, high elasticity, and being able to maintain both of those qualities even in cold temperatures. As a result, it could have wide applications in things like ligament repair, and even biosteel, but who would have thought that it could also be great for violin strings? Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan did, and after studying spiders and their silk for 35 years, he's managed to figure out a way to create sets of spider strings. Why would you do that? Well, they sound really, really good.

Though we might think that a spider would want as many bugs as possible in its web, being overrun by ants is actually a major threat to the eight legged hunters. However, researcher Daiqin Li from the National University of Singapore noticed that ants seemed disinterested in attacking the intricate webs of the golden orb web spiders (Nephila antipodiana). After some investigation, Li and his team determined that this was because the spider spins a powerful chemical weapon into its silk.

YouTube user djflula has a late night rant about why daddy long-legs got its name. He just doesn't understand, dropping gem after spoken gem in a German accent. Not only does he wonder if "daddy long-legs" is short for "father long-legs," but describes the spider as a "furry ball with sticks that come out," but ponders the existential question, "How does a daddy long-legs make a life?"

We have something to think about before bed tonight.

(via Viral Viral Videos)

What do do when you happen to have two of the largest spiders in the world just laying around? You try to make more of them, of course! At least that's what the San Diego Zoo is trying to do with their Goliath Bird Eating Spider, the spider so terrifying they put "bird eating" in its name. Mating isn't easy for these spiders, though. For the males, the courtship dance is part of seduction and part insurance since it is not unusual for females to eat their mates. Fortunately, zoo officials remained on hand through the, uh, "encounter" to make sure no one got digested. The zoo is hopeful that through mating experiments like these, they'll be able to keep a robust captive population of bird eaters and not take more out of the wild. Of course, there are other things you can do with extra goliath spiders.

Seriously, this video doesn't end how you'd expect. Unless you watch Family Guy. Then the ending is fitting.

(via reddit)

Your initial question might be something along the lines of why anyone would want horrible little worms producing the butt-threads of horrible eight-legged hell beasts. The answer is simple: Industry. Threads of spider silk have long been known to have amazing, properties, as Gizmag relates:

It has a tensile strength similar to that of high-grade steel while only being one-fifth as dense, it can stretch up to 1.4 times its relaxed length without breaking, and it can maintain those properties down to a temperature of -40C (-40F).

In large enough quantities, the silk of spiders could be used to repair human ligaments and produce bulletproof vests. Spiders are, however, harder to work with than their cousins the silkworms. For one thing, spiders have a tendency to eat each other in captivity, and are generally difficult to manage in large numbers. Hence, the need to create silkworms that carry the silk-making genetics of spiders. Two companies, Sigma Life Science and Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, began their work by inserting random spider genes into the silkworms. They claim that through this method they've produced threads far stronger than silkworm silk, though not yet as strong as true spider silk. Bolstered by their success, the companies plan to continue their work with more targeted genetic modifications, hoping to get pure spider silk. The idea behind the genetically modified silkworms isn't all that new. Goats with spider genes produced milk that contained high concentrations of silk proteins, which could in turn be crafted into super-strong materials. If Spidersilkworms are too horrific a concept, than perhaps Spidergoat will rest a little easier on your mind. (via Gizmag, Wikipedia)