Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Various and sundry arthropods
Scientists are closing in on the mass production of spider silk.
Spider silk is nature’s miracle fiber: three times stronger than Kevlar, ounce per ounce stronger than steel, able to stretch up to one-half its normal length, and packaged as a minuscule filament 80 times thinner than a human hair. It’s even been said that a strand of spider silk the width of a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 in flight.
Spiders have great eyesight in the UV frequencies, and exploit it to create dazzling neon dances — for sex, of course.
Spiders are bad-ass predators, but centipedes are, um, bad-asser:
Speaking of arthropod sex, horseshoe crabs on the shores of Delaware Bay are having an orgy. It’s like The Dating Game — only all the boys win!
Shrimp sterilizes all life in a salt water aquarium? I can believe it. We used to own a freshwater shrimp who accomplished the same feat.
The Eurypterids may have gone extinct over two hundred million years ago, but a close relative of these giant scorpions may have survived to the present day — underwater.
I’ll close with a picture of a guy getting nipple noogies from a coconut crab.
A little to the left . . . aaaah, that's it.
D.
