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I'm around and will see if I can write up some info posts when I have the chance! Thanks for copying my posts from the previous thread over, I'll try to find replacements for the broken links later.
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Nov 18, 2019 01:13
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:06 |
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The mites in this are weird because the game is normally reasonably accurate with its bugs, but the flying mite clouds are just completely off. The "mites" in this are more like some kind of parastic insect, while real mites are arachnids like our spider and scorpion friends. While they are a gigantic and massively varied group, one thing they have in common with every other arachnid is that they have no wings and cannot fly. They do tend to be absolutely tiny - there's one species that lives exclusively in the trachea of honeybees - so I guess it's not impossible for them to be carried on the wind? Actually, let's go into the accuracy of the things we've seen so far. Obviously there's a lot of sacrifices in accuracy for the sake of fun because the general tarantula lifestyle of lurking in a hole for a week and then pouncing on a passing cricket does not make for a compelling gameplay. First of all, our spider has a grudge against the scorpion and is trying to hunt it down. That's just plain not how spiders or predators in general work. Tarantulas are dumb as a brick and just don't have the capacity to form grudges, and even more intelligent predators tend to avoid doing anything that could get them injured like trying to hunt down and fight another similar predator. In general, both tarantulas and scorpions are content to make a little burrow and then never venture more than a metre or so away from home for their entire lives. The exception there is mature males, who go wandering off in search of a mate, so if you see a tarantula out walking in the wild, chances are it's a mature male who just wants to find a female in the short time left to him. Male tarantulas live for maybe a year past adulthood, while females have been known to live upwards of 20 years. Going by the size of our spider compared to things like the shoe and the phone, chances are our friend is probably a juvenile anyway, so it's virtually impossible to sex it right now. Now for how they move and fight. Tarantulas generally hunt by just pouncing on something and using their size and strength to keep it pinned while the fangs and venom do their job. "Fights" aren't really a thing in their world, if they're trying to bite something it's either because they are hunting a meal or as a defence against a threat, so the whole leg slapping combo thing doesn't really work. The closest thing to anything real there is that a tarantula really, really doesn't want to use its precious venom as a defence - venom is a costly resource in metabolic terms, and using it in a way that doesn't get a meal to pay that cost is a losing proposition, so tarantulas generally go through a set of reactions when faced with a potential threat: 1. Try to escape. Running and hiding is always the best option. 2. Flick itchy hairs at it. Not all tarantulas can do this, but as New World species our playable tarantula and the enemy ones all can. 3. Threat posture! Rear up on the back legs and display those fangs, while raising the front pairs of legs and pedipalps to look bigger. Some species will also hiss via stridulation. If you see a spider doing this then it is seriously ticked off and you should probably stop doing whatever you're doing to it. 4. Slap those raised front legs down on anything that approaches! Spider legs are basically tiny hydraulic rams and are a lot stronger than you would expect, so they can slap pretty hard and this is the closest real spiders get to the Deadly Creatures fighting style. It's strictly a downward slap with those raised front legs, though, with none of the twisting that our spider does. 5. BITE. Even then, some spiders will deliver a dry bite with no venom injection and hope that being stuck with a pair of inch long fangs is enough to deter whatever's bothering them.  Cyriopagopus lividus in threat posture. I'll be spoilering or linking to images in case of any arachnophobes in the thread who don't want to blindsided by them. Bear in mind that spiders are tricky things and will skip steps if they feel like it. Species like the cobalt blue above are notoriously aggressive and will happily go straight to threat posture at the slightest provocation. Jumping...as far as I know, no tarantula can propel itself upwards from the ground like our friend can, but some arboreal (tree-living) species are adept at flinging themselves from foothold to foothold. It's pretty cool to see! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJmfcC0n9N8 As for terrestrial (ground-living) types like our playable spider almost certainly is, they tend to be lumpen things that can't take a fall of more than a couple of inches without rupturing themselves and dying. Our friend is probably a Brachypelma of some description like the flame kneed tarantulas (Brachypelma auratum) we keep coming across. Brachypelmas are generally about the slowest and most lumpen of tarantulas even by terrestrial standards, although like all tarantulas they can move faster than the eye can see when it comes to pouncing on prey over a short distance.  Brachypelma auratum. They're very pretty! And since this has been a very spider-heavy post (I know a lot more about them than I do scorpions) a close-up of how scorpion chelicerae work to replace the broken link in one of my old infoposts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ounmopl6JtU
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Nov 21, 2019 06:27
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CommissarMega posted:What's the largest spider variety that could be kept as a pet? I'm not planning on keeping one myself (aren't they a grey area wrt the animal trade?), but I really think the bigger spiders are Taking them from the wild is very much a grey area at best and one I don't support, but most of the ones you'll see for sale are bred in captivity. The biggest spiders are the three Theraphosa species, with T. blondi (goliath birdeater) famously being the largest recorded spider, and Heteropoda maxima (giant huntsman spider). Giant huntsman spiders have a slightly wider legspan, but they're all gangly legs while birdeater spiders are massive heavy things. Either way, they all reach a legspan of around 12 inches at full size, and by far the easiest one to find in the pet trade is T. blondi. Personally I'm a fan of the gorgeously coloured T. stirmi (burgandy goliath birdeater) and I've honestly never heard of the third species (T. apophysis) being available for sale anywhere. Same goes for the giant huntsman, non-tarantula spiders are much rarer to find as pets.  T. blondi  T. stirmi  H. maxima The famous clock spider is a huntsman of some description. Huntsman spiders are neat in that they're extremely flat and have their legs jointed sideways, allowing them to slide into tiny cracks and underneath cover. They're sometimes called giant crab spiders for this reason, but I think that treads on the territory of Thomisidae, the real crab spiders.
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Nov 21, 2019 16:46
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as heck and I'd like to learn about really big ones.
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Tarantula hawk wasps are large, beautiful insects and are the number one reminder that nature is horrifying. There's a Charles Darwin quote about their fellow parastic wasps the ichneumonidae that no kind of loving god could have created such a thing. Despite how they're shown in the game, the tarantula hawks (Pompilidae) are solitary insects, and like most parasites they're extremely picky about their prey. Actually, "prey" isn't exactly the right word there, because the adults only eat nectar and are major pollinators of some plant species. In any case, adult female tarantula hawks will first dig a nice deep burrow for her nursery, and will then go out looking for a tarantula. Usually that means a mature male tarantula since they're the ones that go wandering around looking for a mate. Poor bastards can't catch a break. Oddly enough, the wasps tend to tackle the spider on the ground rather than from the air, and it usually doesn't end well for the unfortunate spider, which gets stuck with a vicious looking stinger. The venom is a nasty cocktail that permanently paralyzes the spider while leaving it alive, and the wasp then drags the poor thing back to her nursery chamber burrow. Then she lays a single egg on the spider's body, blocks up the entrance and flies off to repeat the process. Once the larva hatches, it will eat the tarantula alive, saving the vital organs like heart and brain until last so their meal stays alive and fresh for as long as possible. Once they're done, they pupate and metamorphise into adults before flying off to spawn the next generation of flesh-eating horrors.  Towards humans and just about everything that isn't a tarantula they're actually pretty docile. Unlike yellowjackets and other eusocial wasps they don't have a hive to protect and they're big enough and obviously able to defend themselves to the point that they don't have many predators, so they've never evolved a need to be aggressive towards most things. They'll still sting if provoked, and the sting is apparently excruciatingly, blindingly painful for about five minutes and then ends with no real ill effects. Nature is beautiful, nature is wonderful, but one thing nature never, ever is is nice. Mr. Vile fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Nov 25, 2019 |
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Nov 25, 2019 06:18
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I've been away for a little bit, btu we've had a couple of animals with two of the weirdest predator defence mechanisms in the animal kingdom in the last few videos, so let's talk about those. The first one is the horned lizard (genus Phyronosoma. Horned lizards, occasionally called horned toads, are weird-looking squat lizards that are sometimes confused with the unrelated Australian thorny devil, a similarly spiny lizard with the badass name of Moloch horridus Horned lizards may not have as metal a name to their, er, name, but they make up for it with one of the most metal defense mechanisms in the world: they squirt blood from their eyes at anything not already detered by their spines.  As well as it just being generally off-putting to be hit in the face by a stream of eye-blood (at a range of up to 1.5m!), the blood is also laced with foul-tasting chemicals. They pull this trick off in a pretty mundane way for such a bizarre adaptation - they just constrict the blood vessels leaving their head so the pressure builds up, and specialised blood vessels around their eyes rupture under the pressure. And now you know why the hitbox for that attack doesn't match up with their mouth. The second animal on our list is those beetles that keeep, well, bombarding you with goo. Those are almost certainly bombardier beetles, which have about the closest thing real life gets to a Pokemon special attack. The abdomen of a bombardier beetle (there's 500+ species of them spread across a number of genera) contains a chemical factory, producing and storing a mixture of two chemicals (hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone), as well as a heavily reinforced chamber containing enzymes that will cause the chemicals to suddenly and violently react. When a bombarider beetle is threatened, it squeezes the two chemicals into the reacting chamber and...  BOOM As well as the chemicals themselves being a rather toxic and foul-tasting cocktail, the reaction heats them to near boiling temperatures, so they can also scald a would-be predator.
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Dec 17, 2019 00:59
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So let's talk about how deadly our titular creatures are. The short answer is: not very. Scorpions can deliver a nasty sting in some cases, and Stuggs would definitely not be in for a fun time after three stings there from, say, an Arizona bark scorpion (Centruroides sculpturatus), but actual fatalities are rare. Wikipedia claims only two recorded deaths in Arizona from that species since 1968 despite there being thousands of stings every year. There are other species with nastier venom, such as the African deathstalker (Leiurus quinquestriatus), but as far as American species go the Arizona bark scorpion is about the worst there is, and a likely candidate for our protagonist scorpion. I don't know nearly as much about scorpions as I do tarantulas, but between ou two protagonist creatures, the scorpion is unquestionably the deadlier of the two as far as humans are concerned. As for the tarantula, There's a big divide in tarantulas between New World (North/South American) and Old World (everywhere else) species. New World species like our protagonist tend to be slower and more docile, and have much less potent venom as far as humans are concerned. To compensate for this, they have abdomens covered in urticating hairs, which they can kick into the air with their back legs, forming a cloud of tiny floating irritation around them. They can cause some problems if you get them in you eyes in breath them in, but in general they'll cause a bit of itching and not much else.  Despite rumours, they can't fire these hairs like bullets or anything of the sort. They just rub their abdomen with one of their back legs to kick a cloud of hairs into the air, a bit like scraping burnt toast with a knife. You can tell when a tarantula has been doing this a lot because they have a bald spot on their abdomen. The hairs don't grow back over time, and the spider has to wait until its next moult to get a fresh set. It's incredibly rare to be bitten by a New World species, and the vaneom is pretty much harmless to humans, about equivilant to a bee sting. Old World species lack urticating hairs completely, and compensate by being much, much faster and more aggressive, with much nastier venom. Bites in humans are more common than their New World counterparts, and a bite can cause horrific pain and muscle cramping for days after the bite, but fatalities are so vanishingly rare that there's really no hard evidence for any fatal tarantula bites anywhere. Either way, a bite is going to be no fun at all and if you need to mess with, say, a Cyriopagopus species, do it with a very long stick.
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Dec 22, 2019 19:30
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Chimera-gui posted:Yeah, there's a reason Struggs was called the deadliest thing in the desert in the opening narration with the second deadliest arguably being the rattlesnake since they are less likely to do dry bites (about 1/4 from I've found) and their venom is much more dangerous to a human compared to spider or scorpion venom, even those of the most dangerous spiders such as the widow, funnel-web and recluse. Venomous snakes in general are far more dangerous to humans than any spider or scorpion, both because they're larger and thus have far more venom to inject, and because they generally eat small mammals and so have venom that is effective against mammalian biology, rather than having evolved to discrupt invertebrate systems. The most dangerous spider in the world (to humans) is generally considered to be either the Sydney funnelweb (Atrax robustus) or Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria). There have been no fatalities from funnelweb bites since 1981 when the antivenom was devoloped, and only around 2% of wandering spider bites are serious enough to need antivenom in the first place. Which is not to say that they're incapable of killing a human, just that even the deadliest of them are not nearly as dangerous as, say, a sociopathic rear end in a top hat with a shovel.
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Dec 22, 2019 23:10
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:06 |
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Chimera-gui posted:You are very welcome. Yeah, it's been fun!
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Dec 28, 2019 05:30
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.