This week on my ResearchBlogging.org column: Could there be evidence of a second type of bipedalism in the hominid family tree? Possibly—though the evidence is scant. At Lawn Chair Anthropology, Zachary Cofran discusses the potential a 3.4 million year old foot may bring to discussions about evolution. How does your liver feel? The Neuroskeptic discusses [...]

“Charlotte’s Web,” the E.B. White childhood classic, ends with Wilbur the pig eagerly waiting for Charlotte’s baby spiders to emerge from their egg sac. When they finally crawl out, they do something that seems pretty amazing to anyone not familiar with how spiders travel long distances: they fly away. Here’s the passage from the last [...]

I was entranced by this image when it appeared today in my facebook stream: Captured by the talented Malaysian photographer Liew Wk, the photo shows a developmental asymmetry in size between the anterior median eyes of this Asian jumping spider. I do not know what caused this imbalance. Perhaps each side is a molt out of sync, [...]

For being mildly arachnophobic I’ve been on a real spider binge lately. Here’s a wonderful Smithsonian-produced video highlighting the role of photography in spider science: (h/t Bug Girl)

Imagine, for a moment, the horror if we humans were stalked by a common predator that hid itself in the open by looking…just like us. A humanoid patrolling the streets like a bloodthirsty mannequin, picking off pedestrians that venture too close. Fortunately for us, this sobering thought is only a grim fantasy. Australian weaver ants, [...]

As the science media today is carrying news of how spiders use defocus to judge distance, I thought it an opportune moment to share the portfolio of a master of spider portraiture. Oklahoma artist Thomas Shahan may scarcely be out of college, but he is recognized worldwide for his startling portrayals of jumping spiders. If [...]

Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [taken with an Apple iPhone 3G & $20 macro lens] There’s a cliché in photography that the best camera is the one you have with you. Recently, the camera most people have with them is a cell phone. By stacking a small magnifying lens on top [...]

Nine new species of colorful, arboreal tarantulas have been discovered in central and eastern Brazil, an area where only seven tarantula species had previously been known. All nine of the newly described species are threatened by habitat loss and potentially by overzealous spider collectors. As described this week in the open-access journal ZooKeys, the newly [...]

To figure out how far away our dinner plate is our brain melds the slightly different images coming from our two eyes. Other creatures, including many insects, move their heads to glean how far a piece of food might be. But jumping spiders (Hasarius adansoni) don’t seem to possess either of these abilities. So how [...]

One of the largest orb-weaving spiders had remained hidden from entomologists in plain sight. The new species of giant golden orb weaver (Nephila komaci), which builds meter-wide webs, entangled a doctoral student who stumbled upon a specimen in a museum collection. "It was surprising to find a giant female Nephila from South Africa in the [...]