This is an absolutely wonderful article about a new discovery: Tarantulas not only posses spinnerets, but have silk glands on their feet. Wired News has a picture-laden article about the whole silky saga. This enables the heavy arachnids to climb sheer surfaces without slipping and falling to their deaths. (tarantulas, even tree-living species, have delicate exoskeletons, and even a 5-foot fall on a floor could be fatal to many)
A few simple experiments in the Journal of Experimental Biology proved that indeed tarantulas were able to climb sheer glass surfaces with tiny silk safety-lines in each of their tarsi. What’s even cooler is that the pores that produced the silk were already known and documented:
SEM photograph of setae on tarantula foot, showing silk-producing pore
Both setae (flat strands) and spigot structures (thin, bright strands) are visible in this shot, which is about 0.01 of a millimeter wide. Before Rind’s team took these images, the spigots were assumed to be heat-sensitive hairs. “Arachnologists spotted [the spigots] 20 or 30 years ago but, as far as I know, nobody described their function,” Rind said. “It’s a little surprising with a creature as well-studied as a tarantula.”
I really dig this story because it shows that there are marvelous things to learn even about well-known and documented organisms, and that simple curiosity and science can lead to even more wonder about the world. (It also shows how ruthless peer-review can bring about better experiments.)
Written in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unraveling shifts that followed, The Life of Insects is set around a seedy decaying Crimean resort. It starts with two rather shady Russian businessmen meeting a third, an American, here to sample the “local business opportunities”. Then effortlessly they transform into mosquitoes and hunt for fresh blood to try. Or were they already mosquitoes and transformed briefly into bloodsucking opportunistic businessmen? A brief explanation of the shape-shifting from the author at this point is all the help the reader going to get, and after that, it’s every louse for himself as several protagonists merge fluidly from human to hexapod as the stories themselves weave and fold in on each other with gleeful abandon. Descriptions, biology, and even scale of the characters and settings vary even in the same sentence. A desperate fly prostitute named Natasha is mistaken for a speck on the American’s dinner plate, but is soon sidling up to him in a dress of shimmering iridescent green,
