#tiger spider

[fandomnerd9602]

Ava Ayala walks out for her room to Y/N…

Ava: so Webhead what do you think of my outfit for the gala?

Y/N: oh tigresa I just may have to wrap you up in my web

Ava: (purrs) not if I do it to you first mi arana

Y/N:

Ava winks and saunters off to the gala…

[inatarachnids]

Tiger Spider (Trichonephila plumipes)

Observed by williambennett75, CC BY-NC

[onenicebugperday]

@lishd submitted: I was just watching The Blue Lagoon (1980) and they showed this lovely friend. I don't think I've seen a spider with a white rump like this. It's set in Fiji, and was filmed in Fiji, Malta, Vanuatu, and Jamaica. Any idea who they are? <3

What a lovely lady! She’s a banded orbweaver in the genus Trichonephila. Given the locations you listed, she’s probably a tiger spider, Trichonephila plumipes.

[macrobitacora]

Araña tigre

[onenicebugperday]

I found this tiny spider in my bedroom. I am in Chile, south america. Here, we call these tiger spiders, and I think (not sure) they can shoot out webs and eat other spiders.

Yes, it’s a tiger spider, Scytodes globula. And you’re right, they do project super sticky webs to catch prey. They’re the only natural predator of the Chilean recluse, which is veeerrry venomous. Here’s a cool video if you wanna see one in action!

[spid3rs0up]

Sorry chad, this is real life, the tiny femboy spider gets the girl.

A big weird rant about my favourite spider.

This is my favourite spider, Trichonephila Plumipes, the Tiger Spider or the Easter Golden Orb weaver. This is probably my favourite spider photo I've ever taken, not only does it look great (look at her hair, it makes me want white hair) but it was the first time i was ever able to ID a male T. Plumipes(next to the big spiders left leg). We'll call the girl Nephila and the boy Dave. And yes, Dave is a grown ass man.

Golden orb weaver males are suuuper tiny compared to their girlfriends. Bug girls are usually bigger than bug boys because bigger girls can have more babies but a little guy can already make enough sperm to fertilize all the eggs ever without needing an extra year to grow. T. Plumipes take this to what i think is the most extreme terrestrial example (I know blanket octopi and angler fish have them beat but don't know of any terrestrial animals that do, let me know if you do).

(Photo of Nephila after she moved out and made another web, I guess he was a pain to live with. Look at that golden silk!)

There are two male phenotypes in T. plumipes (I'm not actually sure which one Dave is) The big ones that are a whopping ~10% the females size and the little ones that are ~1% of the females size. They're not technically a separate sexes and spiders cannot comprehend gender yet so they're like a sub-sex. I like to call them "Alpha males" or "Chads" and "Sigma Males" or "Femboys" respectively because that's funny. Although i suppose being larger would be more feminine in a hypothetical spider society with gender roles...

The "Alpha Chads" gatekeep girls and hang around their web chasing away any smaller dudes hoping to keep her to himself so he can have all her babies. Fortunately these dudes usually get eaten after sex (they deserve it). The "Sigma Femboys" may be small and weak but they have one huge advantage: Being too small, cute and pathetic to eat. This means they can have sex more than once or twice! Since spiders are awesome they can store sperm from multiple spiders for months and choose when/if they get pregnant and who's babies to have or they can mix it up. I like to imagine alot of spiders choose based on how the males tasted. This means being an ass and gate keeping one girl that kills you actually ends up kinda balancing out with getting laid alot but not being able to be picky. So there are two kinds of dudes.

It also means spiders can do the incredibly girlboss gaslight move of cannibalizing a guy after sex and then spitting out his sperm. I would do this too if it wasn't for the cops.

Dave did stick around a while but wasn't eaten (sad, I know) and I don't really feel confident in guesstimating the relative sizes so until I document more males I probably won't know which one he is. But I know he got laid because this was Nephila a day later:

She caught a European bee :) Look at the little love heart between all her legs! It looks super cute in this photo How could you be afraid of a creature that has a love heart on it? She also lost alot of weight overnight, which means she must have laid an egg sack somewhere. Alot of spiders just keep their egg sack in their web but these ones hide them! I never found the egg sack so she did a good job of it. I would guess they do this because such a large spider with such a large web would stand out to predators more.

Speaking of the bee tho, the golden orb weavers here were catching alot of bees. This might be thanks to the golden silk, but I don't think we know this for sure either. Golden orb weavers can chose to make gold or white silk. It's thought they can chose between these based on the prey around like how spiders will change the space between their webs to be able to catch smaller bugs or to save silk if bigger bugs are more common. Certain insects might see the gold and white silk differently, some might notice one colour less or even be attracted to one colour more.

Some bugs (like half their potential mates) are too small for these big ass spiders to eat. I think they are like, in the top 5 biggest web building spiders only behind other golden orb weavers. They can actually lose stuff like venom/digestive goop/energy eating something small enough. They can't just swallow tiny bugs like I do, they eat through their fangs so have to inject their prey with venom and digestive goop then suck it back up once the preys insides are soup. You should be able to imagine how difficult this could be if your prey is the size of one of your fangs or smaller. These bugs can clog up their web tho so they either have to throw them out or get smaller roommates that will eat all their scraps. Like this girl that moved in with a bunch of tent spiders:

She must have helped repair or build some of the tent spiders webs because i found bits of gold silk throughout their big super web. It made me think that these were another type of golden orb weaver but they're not. tent spiders are still pretty big spiders but still smaller than T. Plumipes. This is what can happen if you don't have little roommates to clean up your mess.

Omg they're roommates! (they build colonies with other T. Plumipes too)

Truly the life. living in a big ass web with your girlfriends, all your food is delivered for free, little roommates that help clean, you get to eat half the guys that show up. I love these spiders alot, so glad I get to live in a country covered in them. I wanna hold one someday. I tried to pick one up one time but it felt very rude so I let her be. "You're scared of touching spiders because you have arachnaphobia, I'm scared of touching them because I have social anxiety. We are not the same." Like most spiders they can't really hurt you. They're so chill, they hate biting in self defence and if they do they have tiny fangs and very very mild venom. In my experience animals like birds, cats and humans are way more likely to bite you if you poke them. They will probably hurt more too. All photos taken by me :3

[mypunkpansexualtwin]

Is there a Peter Parker in your Spiderverse?

Oh absolutely, although I haven't completely got him hashed out yet. He might be a spidey, he might not be. He definitely was the one to do the bulk of the reporting on the initial spidey exposure and Oscorp's part in it.

I feel like either way, he was also instrumental in turning the "we all got bit by radioactive spiders, now what?" group chat/support group into a proper political movement/union. Largely because of Uncle Ben's influence, even if he was kept in the dark about some of the specifics. (Because I would sooner slow roast and then eat my entire left leg than accept anyone saying that Ben Parker was not a union man.)

[mypunkpansexualtwin]

Slides awkwardly into your inbox So any facts/thoughts about Tiger-Spider (and Haze too!) you wanna share 😳👉👈

HI PRINCE HELLO YES I WOULD LOVE TO TALK ABOUT MY GIRL AND HER BELOVED PARTNER. Bulk of this is going under a cut cause otherwise it's gonna be Beefy.

So, Tiger-Spider, aka Maura Charlotte "MJ" Jameson, is actually one of about a hundred different spideys in her universe. Short version, Oscorp had a lot of spiders that they were experimenting with, tried to move the experiments through normal channels for shady reasons, and, as is standard for comics, things went tits up for story reasons. All the experiments got out in a highly crowded place (airport or something) and a lot of people got bit by a few dozen different varieties of mutated spider. Chaos ensued.

MJ ended up getting her powers from a hybrid jumping spider/costa rican tiger spider (which is where the design for her suit came from), so not only is she sturdier than most spideys in a fight, she can also jump. Like, "clear smaller skyscrapers in one leap" jump, and hit the ground completely unscathed. I also mentioned that she's an acrobatics coach during her civilian time, which factors into her movement on her webs. Not only does she move like a trapeze artist as expected, there's also a lot of aerial silks-style movement to getting up and down, which can hopefully be seen in the Heck Hand part of the one drawing I've got of her.

Considering the position she has as the face and unofficial head of the mutant union, especially as a mostly-non-vigilante, most villains are willing to give her a wide berth and not start shit (especially since those legs can kick hard enough to crack steel) and, depending on the situation, help out with the mess left over. Which is how she met Haze.

Naomi Cruz, host to experimental Symbiote designated "Haze" (who I have no picture for which is a shame and tbh a little bit of a surprise that there's no symbiote oc picrews or anything given how the tom hardy movies have popped off) was made to be a Venom killer with fewer of its weaknesses; narrower decibel threshold, resistant to fire, can survive longer without a host, etc. And was stolen by and bonded with Naomi. Kind of on the line between vigilante and out-and-out criminal, they met Tiger-Spider after getting clocked in the head with a busted squeegee in the middle of a fight with Tiger's then-boyfriend who happened to be another Spidey (and frankly kind of a douche that I never named). The two had gone tearing across the side of a kid's cancer ward that she'd just cleaned, freaked a bunch of the kids out, and were about to leave her with the mess before she chucked a bunch of her stuff at them. Boyfriend tried to dip with the excuse of "sorry babe, can't, got a fight I'm in the middle of!" and Haze didn't let that fly for a second. Called a temporary truce to get their shit cleaned up and made a habit of checking in on Tiger when they could.

Way down the line identities get revealed to each other, Tiger splits with unnamed golden boy douchebag, and dates the terrifying 9-foot-tall purple slime monster and even scarier nonby lesbean host because they're good to her.

I don't have much more specifics than that though.