Spider Uses a Light Show to Trick Eager Male Fireflies into Its Web

  • I love spiders!

    Just kidding.

    I block them by putting a transparent cup over them, slide an open book cover beneath where they stand, so that they must enter on top of it, close the book, and off we go - I, the book, the cup that I press with all my force, and the spider trapped inside - to the nearest opening in the building, wishing them the very best on their new way of life, outside, and for me to live and thrive.

    In my apartment, and I swear this is not a joke, most of the time I use "NoSQL - A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence - Distilled", as my main transport mechanism.

    Anyway, to the point. Similarly interesting behaviors of spiders include using web vibrations for communication and sensing, apparently even including tuning. You can easily google (is this still a cool way of saying "search"?) related articles, just ignore the web apps Vibrations API article on the MDN.

  • I always found these types of things particularly creepy. Scaled up to human level, imagine a creature that trolls around luring you with visually-convincing mates only to eat you.

    Bram Stoker's Dracula had a particularly good bodyhorror version of this in the multi-bodied "Woman".

  • This reminds me of this sci-fi book called Children of Ruin where in a terraformed world, a genetics experiment goes wrong and the whole place is now overrun with super-intelligent giant spiders, who were infected with the uplift virus and have built their own civilization in the meantime — and who are protected from orbit by the immortal computer intelligence of Avrana Kern, who has determined in the intervening centuries, that she likes the spiders better than people... Nice reading! Recommended!

  • I'm old enough to know I'd be the first firefly in there and probably would take a friend down with me.

  • https://archive.is/s1atW

  • https://www.wussu.com/poems/lctlq.htm

  • This seems like a lot of complexity dedicated to a reward otherwise obtainable with less complexity.