Funnelweb spiders was a clue on Jeopardy! tonight.
Thanks to this thread, I knew the answer was “What is Australia?”
Yeah but you ate his lobster cousin and family’s gotta stick together.
Yeah, when i was growing up in Australia, about the only time i ever saw a funnel-web was when my friends and i actively went hunting for them. For the most part, if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.
I did see one incident that could be described as a close call. I was living with a friend of mine, and his wife and daughter. One evening, his two-year-old daughter was standing near the back door and a funnel-web walked straight between her legs and into the kitchen. Luckily, the spider was quickly dispatched with no harm done.
Personally, when i was a kid the most likely cause of pain for me was these suckers. On more than one occasion, i accidentally trod on a nest and paid dearly for my mistake. (More details about them here and here.
Well, i have no history with Blake until this thread, so i can’t make a judgement on the issue either way, and won’t presume to tell you what to think. Still, i think his contributions to this thread were reasoned and reasonable. YMMV.
Oh god, those things. Bites sting like a mother, they stink when you squish 'em and in PNG they just LOVED to live in mango trees. I once saw a little kid get swarmed while we was climing one and just drop cause of the pain.
Great. I just escaped from the deadly flesh-eating earwigs, and now ralph 124c wants to import Sydney Funnelweb Spiders and box jellyfish and giant bulldog ants and tai-pans and drop bears (whatever they are) for me to get eaten by.
I may never get off my chair again. Oh, well. At least my mom has put a nice, comfy pad on the seat so my butt won’t get sore from sitting on hard wood.
A sedentary lifestyle is far more dangerous than taipans, funnelwebs and bullants.
OK, a funnelweb’s venom kills in about an hour and a half of agony. A tai-pan, maybe you’ll last a few hours. Box jellyfish, you have what, about four minutes?
I’ll stay on my chair, where, if I can convince my mom to feed me, I could potentially last years before my flesh grows into the weave of the fabric.
I don’t want to be eaten by spiders, insects, snakes, or jellyfish.
Or drop bears. What the hell is a drop bear? And how fast do they kill?
Their nature is self evident and the kill time depends on the launch height.
Would this thread be complete without mention of the commonBlue-Ringed Octopus? ?
No it would not.
People have been talking about dangerous Australian animals, and the subject of kangaroos has been brought up, but no one has mentioned the kangaroos armed with Stinger missiles. For shame.
Blake and Desmostylus,
Quit sniping at each other. NOW.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
The points about Australia being such an old continent and dry/mineral poor soils had me wondering…why are there so many marsupials? N. America has only one marsupial species…placental-birth mammals are far more common in the world.
So what advantages (if there are any) does marsupial birth bring to the kangaroos, wombats, etc.?
Austarlia is just so weird…I’ll have to visit some day (after I get my funnelweb spider franchise off and running)!
In my geography class a few years back, the professor told us that a desert is any area where the average annual rainfall is less than water loses due to evaporation in the same year. So, my area (southern Nevada) qualifies, as exposed water loses about 72 inches per year, while we only get 3-5 inches of rain.
And by that definition, there are plenty of parts of the ocean that qualify as deserts.
Another question with no agreed upon simple answer. In all probability though it seems to be mostly luck coupled with isolation. Essentially by the time the mammals were able to start diversifying the world had split into four major landmasses: Euramerica, South America, Australia and Africa. That’s a bit of an oversimplification but it’s close enough. All those landmasses had both marsupial and placental animals resident on them. Due to factors as yet undertermined the marsupials died out in Euramerica and Africa by the time those continents rejoined. There’s no obvious reason why that occurred but it may well have been simple chance since in Australia exactly the opposite happened and the placentals were exterminated and in South America the two groups lived successfully side by side with neither group dominating. So there’s clearly no inherent reason why placentals have to dominate in any environment.
However once a group comes to dominate a large area it has far more opportunities to diversify. It is also subject to far more selective pressures which tend to increase the ‘fitness’ of the group. That’s why ingeneral when an ‘island’ ecosystem comes into contact with a ‘mainland’ system the island species almost always lose. It’s a simple numbers game. The placentals, having exclusive run of 4 continents, managed to diversify in ways that simply weren’t seen elsewhere amongst either marsupials or placentals. That was probably largely due simply to the huge range of environments available within that massive area.
The highly variable climate of those 4 continents almost certainly also helped to produce a lot of highly adaptable generalist species from rats to rabbits to cats. Every environmental ‘catastrophe’ that struck Europe or Africa, whether prolonged drying periods or ice ages or the reversal of those things left behind disturbed ecosystems which selected for those species that could rapidly adapt to the new environment. In essence the environmental changes were selecting for pest species that could live off a broad variety of foods and were smart enough to adapt to new challenges. South America and especially Australia were Australia were more stable and that coupled with their relatively small isolated landmasses resulted in less diversity of mammal species and more specialist species. When South America collided with North America again the northern continent had large numbers of generalist, adaptable animals that were able to rapidly invade the south, aided in no small part by the environmental upheaval caused by the collision. Essentially South America had become a disturbed ecosystem at precisely the time when it was opened up to invasion by species pre-adpated to disturbed ecosystems. Not surprisingly the local mammals lost out bigtime. However it wasn’t just the marsupials that lost out, just as many indigenous placentals were exterminated.
Australia OTOH never suffered any such invasion. The native fauna were free to adapt to their stable environment and specialise where needed without interference. There were several waves of minor placental invasions of rats and bats but nothing comparable to the invasion of South America with entire suites of invasive plants, invertebrates etc., associated with periods of major climate change.
So the general answer is that marsupials managed to hold out in Australia initially probably due to luck, and even managed to outcompete the placentals. That enabled them to occupy a broad range of ecological niches and diversify into numerus species. That accounts for the number of marsupial species. The fact that they have never needed to face a major invasion of their island by introduced species at a time of ecological change has meant that they have been able to easily hold out most invaders.
There is a suggestion that the smaller brains of marsupials is also an advantage in a resource poor system, however the problem with that argument is that Australia has several introduced placental species with comparatively large brains that managed to outcompete several marsupial species. While it’s no doubt true that in some cases having small brain is an advantage that alone doesn’t explain the dominance of marsupials in Australia.