☕️arachnids?
Wholeheartedly approve. We have a joke in our apartment that our household is one step beyond “the people who are willing to take the spider outside” and are instead “the people who don’t even care there’s a spider there, or rather do care, but only in the sense that we call each other over to coo at it”
On the whole I am mostly familiar with spiders, but did grow up with scorpions around for a bit of the time my family lived in Arizona. At the time I was pretty scared of them, but I think nowadays we’d get along much better (although still at a more respectful distance than I go for with spiders....). I also owe them some credit for one of my personal sci-comm successes, which was taking the black light we had out for an event at the museum and showing kids -- and some of my coworkers! -- how you could use it on preserved scorpions we have in our little naturalist’s corner. Everyone loses it a little over the fluorescence, which I think is so funny because I do personally think it’s cool, but I’m familiar with the trick because growing up, my dad used to use a UV light to do a little “monsters under the bed” type check for me and my middle sister when we were going to sleep in the summer to prove there weren’t any scorpions in our bedroom! (Which, when I tell that to all the nice, extremely midwestern visitors the museum gets, earns me a look like I grew up on another planet. But I love doing scicomm through storytelling!)
Some of the other funky little pals in the phyla are very good (harvestmen! amblypygids!) and they’ve got a great evolutionary history -- I was doing some research on scorpion fluorescence at one point to have more to talk about at the museum and was delighted to learn that even some of their fossils fluoresce! I’m afraid that ticks are probably going to be the one member of the class that will probably remain permanently Not Valid for me (I am extremely stressed out by them, unfortunately), but on the whole they are a group of friends.
