Here’s a comforting thought. When you arrive home and open the front door or enter your bedroom, the spiders can hear you.
It has long been known that spiders can hear sounds via leg hairs that bend in response to vibrations arriving through the air or through solid objects such as floors or walls. But until now, we thought they could only hear airborne vibrations a few centimetres or “spider lengths” away at most.
It now seems that this same approach actually lets them hear sounds up to 5 metres away.
Gil Menda at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleagues were studying a type of jumping spider,Phidippus audax, that they assumed relied almost completely on sight and vibrations they can feel through other objects, such as leaves or floorboards.
But microelectrodes implanted in the spiders’ brains showed that neurons responded to sounds such as chairs scraping and people clapping even when the noises were made 3 to 5 metres away.
“We were very surprised,” says Menda. “Our studies extended the range of auditory sensitivity to more than 3 metres – over 350 body lengths – for our spiders.”
The team established that the spiders freeze when exposed to low-frequency sounds of about 80 to 400 hertz that resemble a low hum, or buzz. They discovered that this overlaps with the wingbeat frequency of predatory insects such as parasitoid wasps and flies, concluding that the hearing abilities they found in jumping spiders have evolved to help them avoid predators.
This makes it even LESS plausible that they would crawl in your mouth while you are sleeping, or bite you for any reason. You are a mountain that creates wind and thunder, they only want to avoid you.
WELL, to quote my former coworker who is an entomologist:
It’s not technically “hearing” as they have no ears or tympanic membranes but all the hairs sense changes in vibrational patterns. The fact that they can sense this and from such a distance is pretty amazing.
Amphipods are small crustacean that inhabits all acuatic environments, from ocean depths to groundwater, in freshwater systems, also found in caves and sea ice. Their feeding strategies are various: detrital feeders, herbivores, scavengers and suspension feeder, over 800 Species of amphipods are know worldwide. These amphipods of the families Epimeriidae and Iphimediidae are among the prettiest, these living gems are predominantly red, and fades quicly with increasing depth. They are foud in the Southern Ocean and are tiny, just 2-4cm long. At 1950 m Epimeria larsi, aka the pink gem holds the deepest known species record for the genus, and was collected from the northern Ross Sea slope.
Photo: Top left: Epimeria rimicarinata; Top right: E.larsi; Middle row: E. schiaparelli (named after the photographer); Bottom right: Epimeria robusta. The bottom left image is of a closely related genus, Echiniphimedia, aptly named the ‘prickly’ amphipod. Credit: Stefano Schiaparelli (University of Genoa) and David Bowden (NIWA)/ IPY CAML voyage TAN0802.
Generally, male octopuses have an arm modified to deliver a packet of sperm. They insert this arm into the females’ mantle and deposit that sperm. They often try to stay as far away from each other as possible because cannibalism is always a possibility. In the video above, the octopus are mating beak-to-beak— which is very strange, but very cool. So cool that we wrote paper about it.
They’re all here! I took it upon myself to create an illustration of a Mythological creature or character for every letter of the alphabet, trying to span across a multitude of cultures and creature-types. Another thing I wanted to accomplish with this project was to find some the more unusual and/or obscure creatures that don’t get as much representation in artwork. Individual Tumblr Posts with said creatures’ descriptions are below.
Again, I’ll be making this into a small run of books as a way to test the waters. If there’s more demand for a larger run, I’ll definitely be looking into it!
Studies have shown that octopuses learn easily, including learning by observation of another octopus.
They can solve problems, as when they remove a plug or unscrew a lid to get prey from a container.
They are the first invertebrates to be seen using tools,
such as using coconut shells to hide from potential predators and using
rocks and jets of water in a way that could be classified as tool use.
Common octopuses will collect crustacean shells and other objects to
construct fortresses, or “gardens,” around their lairs. Other octopuses
carry shells for protection.
They have been found to play with a ‘toy’ and to have individual
responses and individual temperaments, with some scientists believing
they have individual personalities.
All octopuses are venomous, but only the small blue-ringed octopuses are known to be deadly to humans.
Zombie worms were discovered in 2002 when extracted from the rotting skeleton of a grey whale almost 10,000 feet beneath the ocean. Also called “boneworms,” the mouth-and-anus-less Osedax worms use bone-melting acid to absorb nutrients directly. Also, they’re all female. The males are microscopic and live inside the females’ bodies.
