Story here: http://blog.perunature.com/2012/12/new-species-of-decoy-spider-likely.html
A tiny spider that makes a larger decoy out of leaf litter and then jiggles it with silk threads to deter predators.
It’s interesting that the spider has enough of a self-image to make a decoy of itself!
Size does matter!
Sometimes it seems that there’s nothing so strange that some species somewhere doesn’t do it.
I think bower birds are way cool
I like turtles!
This raises a question: “Spiderman, Spiderman/Does whatever a spider can.”
Well, can he make a larger-than-life-sized dummy of himself out of webbing? If so, cite!
(Mods: Should I make a new thread and put it in Cafe Society?)
Well, it doesn’t have to have a self-image, does it? All it needs to “know” is that debris arranged in such-and-such a way will make it more probable that it’ll make it to reproductive age.
Yeah but “such-and-such a way” even includes 8 legs. Amazing. How in the hell did that trait evolve? Did all the spiders that built 5 legged versions get eaten?
Also, can its predators tell the difference between a 7 legged decoy and an 8 legged one?
This is indeed very cool.
I am inspired to make a more frightening lawyer puppet, and jiggle it outside my office. 
SPLAT
Didn’t scare me none.
Neat. I think I’d trade the existence of that spider species for one anonymous human infant. :^)
I find spiders endlessly fascinating. That is so cool! 
My lawyer puppet! Ruined! :eek:
Not necessarily; all natural selection needs is a difference in how likely 8-legged-decoy-makers are to reproduce compared to 7-legged-decoy-makers and so on. If there’s no difference, you’d expect a range of leg numbers; if there is a difference, you’d expect all of the dolls to have eight legs.
Compare this to eye color in humans: Human eye color ranges from very dark to very light, often in the same region, which implies that there is no real difference, on average, in how many healthy children people have based on their eye color. This is, in fact, the case in most of the world through most of our modern history.
The idea to keep in mind is Natural selection through modified descent:
[ul]
[li]Modified descent means randomness. If every child had one parent, and every child were a perfect clone of that parent, nothing new could develop. There needs to be some random element, such as shuffling the genes from two people during sex, in order to give natural selection something to work on. (I think in species that do reproduce asexually, like single-celled life, randomness comes from mutations and gene transfer in the form of plasmid exchange and similar, but I could be wrong.)[/li][li]Natural selection means there has to be a statistical difference in how many children some have compared to others. (And, of course, those children themselves have to be successful at having children, and then grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so on, and so forth.) Otherwise, you end up with a situation like eye color in humans: A large range with nothing working to clamp it down, so it remains a large range, and nothing happens. The forces that work to ‘clamp it down’ are collectively referred to as ‘selection pressures’.[/li][li]And, of course, it has to be genetic to begin with. If you find a bunch of spiders with red carapaces, you might be justified in thinking it was genetic and there was a selection pressure that favored that color. However, it might well be that their food colors them, like how flamingos turn pink from their diet, and there simply hasn’t been enough pressure against red spiders to drive them to extinction yet. This gets more complex in humans, where culture can be passed on in ways similar to genes, which makes it hard to determine what, precisely, even is genetically determined in humans. Hence the nature-vs-nurture debate.[/li][/ul]
I raise you one infant panda.
Thanks for sharing this!
And the researchers studying the “spider” manipulating the puppet were never heard from again.
That is brilliant.
Now I want to see finger monkey glove puppet marionettes.
And when the spider sticks a needle into the dummy, a rival spider elsewhere mysteriously drops dead.