June 05, 2005
scrotum
I couldn't be satisfied until I did justice to the silliness of last entry's title. So now you all get to bristle at the title of this one.
A couple weeks ago there was a real big, real fast brown spider crawling around the desk. "Damn," I thought. "It might be a brown recluse," a spider whose bite, depending on your physiology, could burn a large painful crater in your flesh the size of a man's fist or larger.
I did a little investigation. It probably wasn't a recluse. It was out in the open, skittering across a busy desk. I learned that in the US, it's mainly found in the south-central region. There have been encounters elsewhere, but that's usually due to human interaction of some kind.
I'm suddenly fascinated with spiders. I found a nice looking one today and snapped a shot, hoping to identify it later. When you're a total novice, identifying a creature as diverse as a spider is a little mystery hunt itself, and I learned a bunch of cool words already. See below:
Wikipedia taught me the word "laterigrade" which refers to those big outward-held crab-like legs, the second pair of which are usually the longest. I looked around for pictures of spiders with laterigrade legs and finally found the Xysticus genus. Another search for Xysticus and there he was in his crabby glory: Xysticus Elegans. Of course, to confirm the identity of some spiders you need to dissect their sex organs, but I'm pretty confident that I got the right one.
It's a pretty unremarkable spider, but I only say that because there are no real in depth resources on this spider in specific. Contrast this with the cult following of the black widow or whatever.
. . .
I'm working on the photo requests. It's tough to get images that convey a specific, sought-after emotion. But I think I'll find something soon.
Posted by Alchemae at June 5, 2005 01:47 AM