The Willowwacks @hgtentacles-blog - Tumblr Blog

A microscopic spectacle: these diatoms (Bacillaria paxillifer) slide parallel to each other in large colonies. I can only speculate as to why, but I imagine it is a method to access sunlight for photosynthesis while also providing a quick route to safety. 250x magnification, 4x speed.

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Golden silk orbweavers spin beautiful webs that are best appreciated by walking into them face-first. They are ubiquitous in Texas during the summer, only leaving once you guess their name.

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Lmao

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I know I posted a tardigrade video recently, but you can see its little claws and mouth in this one.

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This is a tiny manatee, don’t try to convince me otherwise.

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What I wouldn’t have given for a nice macro lens to get close to this tiny yellow crab spider. I guess digital zoom will have to do for now.

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Spïœdr fren

vintar

hello i have learnt more spider facts

spiders will pull their own legs clean off if they get damaged because most of them can regrow legs during molting, which explains why you often see spiders missing a leg but never any missing half a leg?

some remarkably distressing scientists proved this by getting a spider to pull off all of its legs and then feeding its limbless torso for months until it sprouted a full complement of legs again and then hopefully used them to get the fuck out of dodge

baby spiders don’t get lenses until their first molt and before that they just have baby eyes and while this ought not to be any weirder than the concept of baby teeth, welp,

there are so many spiders floating around thousands of metres up in the air that they’re described as “aerial plankton”

The Sky Is Full Of Spiders

there are spider-parasitising spiders but instead of laying eggs in organs or stealing blood or anything like that they just ride on top of bigger spiders and steal snacks when their mighty steed is eating

there are ant-mimicking spiders that use their disguises to raid ant nests and w/e but there are also ant mimics that just. hang out. they make fake ant colonies full of fake ants. sometimes the actual ants that they’re mimicking find their house and live with them. stealth 100

some mother spiders live in communal family nests, where multiple mothers can work together to bring down bigger prey while all their collected babies are cared for by the babysitters

some mother spiders feed their babies mouth to mouth like birds

some mother spiders carry their babies around and i was aware of this but not the fact that if you steal their eggsac they’ll freak out and search for it for hours and sometimes end up adopting anything that’s vaguely the right size, they will carry around empty snail shells for weeks and lovingly dote on them…

guys i am literally about to cry over spider moms