The Cool Awesome Arachnid Thread! - A thread dedicated to the best/worst animals!

Coelacanth

Coelacanth

Your local living fossil.
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Sep 29, 2018
Spiders. Either you think they crawled out from the depths of Hell itself, or you think they're the nicest little (and not so little) dudes out there. Post your best and discuss the hobby of keeping arachnids!

Peacock jumping spiders are pretty cool.


And some tarantulas are pretty like this brazilian jewel:

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Immediately hijacking this thread:
One of my greatest passions is macro photography. While I primarily try to capture bees, spiders are also wonderful subjects - note the silly hair antenna in the middle of this tarantula's forehead (images may take a while to load due to ~1440p res).
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Unfortunately, we are not blessed with the huge phidippus jumping spiders of North America around these parts. Most arachnids are positively tiny
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And therefore quite challenging to photograph, particularly when they're skiddish
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But there are a lot of Opiliones (harvestmen) around, who now live in a state of perpetual confusion because their surroundings are continuously being bumped by a large camera lens
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Spiders closeup tend to have :< faces - a colleague of mine once described this look as "a man in a foreign country who has forgotten how to ask where the bathroom is"
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I let at least one small (web) spider live in most rooms in my apt in some corner. When I moved in, the apt had intermittent ants and silverfish. Once the spiders were introduced, this stopped pretty much immediately and I've never had to deal with any other pests. Great flatmates.

I also highly recommend the spider videos on this YT channel, really beautiful footage and photos

 
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spiders are extremely dope and arachnophobes are cringe. all spiders are very chill bros who eat annoying bugs and do not want to fuck with you. if you insist on being freaked out by any bug, then be freaked out by wasps and hornets AKA the hood niggers of the insect world. some of those fuckers will come at you just for fun.

one Cool Spider Fact I like is that a bunch of different jumping spider species have evolved to very convincingly mimic ants, sometimes to hunt ants freely without being detected by the hive, but also because spider predators generally leave ants the fuck alone:

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top: ant. bottom: spider. no bird is gonna figure that shit out.

there's a specific kind of spider that makes golden web silk:

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from Wikipedia;
Experimental evidence suggests that the silk's color may serve a dual purpose: sunlit webs ensnare bees that are attracted to the bright yellow strands, whereas in shady spots, the yellow blends in with background foliage to act as a camouflage. The spider is able to adjust pigment intensity relative to background light levels and color; the range of spectral reflectance is specifically adapted to insect vision.
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their webs are also large and strong enough to catch prey as large as small birds and bats:

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despite being a common subject for "damn nature you scary" memes, golden silk orb-weavers are extremely non-aggressive and their venom - if you can even get one to use it on you - is not dangerous to humans. big spiders need a lot of calories to stay alive and maintain their webs, and they're very uninterested in using energy for any reason other than immediate survival needs. these spiders don't even commonly cannibalize mates, as it's more energy-efficient for the female to just chill out and let the male do his thing rather than fight him off or try to capture him. big scary spider is friend.

 
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User names must be unique said:
jumping spiders are neet but it kinda freaks me out how smart they seem.
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They're smart enough to remember facial features. Depending on the personality some of them actually get excited when they see their owners! Like I now have 5 jumping spiders (with two more and a baby dwarf colombian bluebottle tarantula on the way!) and I've been teaching the youngsters that when they see the blue set of plastic tweezers in front of them it means I'm giving them food. One of which (named Carmen because she's very good at escaping) will actually reach out to take the fly rather than jump at it. It's fascinating to watch.
 
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Heliantheae said:
Thanks for reminding me about that Portia segment. I saw it on TV ages ago, it's from The Hunt, episode 3 "Hide and Seek (Forests)".
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Weird I could have sworn it was from a Wildlife on One episode called Spiders from mars, so I looked it up so I could call you names for being wrong on the internet but you're right. I did however find the entire series on archive,org so I'm fairly happy.


Edit: I don't think the link worked properly it's 123 on the list. standard definition and some very 90's editing in the intro but damn fascinating documentary
 
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I have a soft spot for spiders, I think they're pretty neat with beautiful webs. Have a pic of a beaut I took two years ago. Was a pretty big one for me to spot it, the camera doesn't quite show it.
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And this little guy kept me company at the pool a year ago. I took him over to the wall closer to a bush before I left.
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(Couldn't get a closer look on the pant leg.)

I'd take pictures of scorpions if they weren't so freaky to be around, if only because I only ever find them in the house, and they're absolutely not allowed in the house. A brother got stung by one earlier this year, so they're on the shit-list. Same with camel spiders, we have them out here and they're actually terrifying to see in person. Big motherfuckers. No, I didn't get a picture of it on the side of our house that one night, why would I?

Anyway, have a crab spider, they're my favorite kind of spider because they like to chill on flower petals. So smol.
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I had two female grass spiders in my kitchen window that were my little outside pets for the late summer and early fall this year. Grass spiders look like wolf spiders and are around the same size but they have long spinnerets (and differently arranged eyes) and mostly chill in their webs. They're fast as fuck and very skittish, so it was cool having them right there to watch because normally if you so much as look directly at them they bolt back into their funnel. Throwing fat bugs into the web from the back stairs was always fun to watch.

I posted this earlier this fall in one of the other creepy crawly appreciation threads but this is a better place for it.



Originally I called them Upstairs Neighbor and Downstairs Neighbor but Downstairs Neighbor was renamed to Tank Ass. She was an absolute unit and my favorite.
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Over the course of the fall we decided they were gay spiders because they lived so close together, shared the main web, and bullied away the males that came knocking. Upstairs Neighbor was a solidly large female but you can really see how huge Tank Ass was here.
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I made up my mind just a little too late that I would catch her and keep her warm and fed until she died of old age, but the night I was getting stuff together to do it in the morning the temperature crashed through the floor and I never saw her again. I've got an idea of where she might've crawled into and died, so before the cold weather comes back I might try to recover her and soak her in alcohol to pin her to a card and get a true size. RIP, you thicc ass arachnid.

Last pic I took, a couple nights before the cold beat me to her.
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@Kari Kamiya fun fact: when soldiers returned to the UK from the Middle East conflicts they began needing to double check and make sure there were no camel spiders hiding in their luggage. They'd sneak in because the luggage provided shade before departure.

The new spoods arrived! The baby tarantula's gonna become one of these:

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But more interestingly the jumping spider was a lucky dip buy. The spiders are from South Africa. What I got surprised me.

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It's a Mexcala Elegans. It doesn't seem to have a common name, but it's fascinating. It mimics and feeds on ants!
 
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