Friday arachnid blogging: not a spider

Well now we've all seen plenty of these creatures. Sometimes they are busily legging it through the undergrowth. Other times crowds of them are gathered on the shady side of a house, doing nothing much for hours on end.

One thing they aren't, though, is spiders. They are only spider relatives, and not terribly close ones either. They're opiliones, better known as harvestmen or daddy-long-legs; not to be confused with the spider Pholcus, which is also called daddy-long-legs, and certainly not to be confused with the crane fly, an insect that also shares this common name.

There's another, even cooler looking opilione beneath the fold; it's a very big picture, so if you have a slow connection you can make yourself a sandwich while it downloads.

Opiliones do have a rather spider-like habitus, or overall 'look'. Many (but by no means all) have the exaggeratedly long, thin legs that are the source of one of its common names. A few spiders have legs like that, but most don't. The really obvious difference between the two groups is that spiders have two main body sections, the cephalothorax and the abdomen, whilst opiliones appear to have only one. 'Appear', because they actually do have the same body division as spiders. Unlike in spiders, though, their two body sections are joined by a broad, fused connection rather than a dainty petiole, so they look like one big blob. If you look carefully at this one, though, you can see the division:

For all their spider-like appearance, though, opiliones seem to be as unrelated to spiders as one can be within the Arachnida. On the Tree of Life website, David Maddison divides the Arachnida into two basic groups. One contains, among other things, the spiders. Maddison places opiliones basal to the second group, whose most famous members are the scorpions. According to Maddison's cladogramme, opiliones (and scorpions etc.) are even less closely related to spiders than are the Acari (ticks and mites), a group universally accepted as Arachnida but (unlike opiliones) traditionally excluded from the discipline of arachnology. (Acari are simply too large a group, and morphologically/behaviourally too distinct from other arachnids; they get a whole discipline of their own, acarology.)

The other animals in the opiliones' subgroup are fierce indeed. Everybody knows about scorpions and their stings. Then there are the solfugids (wind-spiders or camel-spiders), which lack the venom of spiders or scorpions but have huge jaws that can easily slice into a human finger. Then there are the pseudoscorpions, which are unterrifying (to us) only because they are so tiny. Were we the size of an ant, we would find pseudoscorpions (which inject venom with their fingers and shoot silk out their jaws) significantly less cute.

Opiliones, though, are the pacifists of the Arachnida. 'Pacifist' in relative terms, of course, for the Arachnida are on the whole quite voracious predators. Some opiliones specialise in (for example) devouring snails. Most, though, will take what they can get. That could be something they kill, but it could also be something they scavenge, or even odd bits of decaying plant material. And two things make them outliers among all the Arachnida. They can include in their diet a bit of solid food (most Arachnida can only suck up the goop they have made by spewing digestive fluids onto or into their prey). And male opiliones have something that other arachnid males can only envy: a penis.

You'll find another opilione here No you won't; the 'other opilione' is the one just above there. Thanks to Aidan for the catch. The T6I proofreader who let that one get by is being flayed alive in our dungeons even now.

23/5

Well, in my case it all depends on where you start counting. My answers would be:

[there is none]

and

[there is none],

respectively.

Now, what was that all about? This:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Via Pharyngula via Profgrrrrl.

Pas compris

There is an unfunny American comic strip called Mallard Fillmore. Now it is no sin for MF to be unfunny. Or rather, it is a sin, and a bad one, but it is a sin shared by almost every other comic strip I have ever seen. MF, however, is special; it is popular with strident American rightwingers because it espouses a stridently American rightwing worldview. Given this paramount virtue, its unfunniness is a mere bagatelle.

The Editors has decided that MF could do with a funniness upgrade. His effort is an improvement, but then it could hardly be otherwise. (You are likeliest to enjoy The Editors's work if you approach it with an extremely visually-literal aesthetic sensibility.)

The Editors is also kind enough, or perhaps not, to link to the original series of MF whence he chose his subject. The eponymous protagonist is pissed off to find that the restaurant he is visiting, and in which he has received poor service, has a mandatory service charge; a forced tip, if you will. The duck rants on and on, over the space of several weekday strips, that it's terrible for him to have to tip a server, a server who has provided poor servive at that, because then there is no incentive for servers to provide good service, etc. etc. etc. Yes yes; one gets his point, such as it is, about a panel and a half into the first strip of the series. But perhaps MF's author thinks his target audience are slow learners.

I have no intention here of debating whether restaurant workers are underpaid, still less about any of the other things The Editors's commenters are debating. I wish merely to note that MF's author appears to have omitted the strip showing that his waterfowl is sitting in a restaurant in Communistia or Bolshevikistan or Europe or some other godless foreign hellhole where the service is compris. By all available evidence, the duck is in a good old American restaurant whose management has, for reasons of its own, chosen to make a service surcharge part of the price it demands for a meal.

Unless the wait staff have formed an anarcho-syndicalist commune and forced the manager at gunpoint to adopt the service charge, the manager decided that the service charge would be among the terms on offer. And unless there is a dollar in it for Jack Abramoff and his friends, the Republicans of the US Congress are unlikely to have passed a law requiring customers to submit to service charges and look happy about it. No, the restaurant is free to tell prospective customers, '...and we're going to add 15% on top of that for service, and if you don't like it you can fuck off down to Applebee's® or Denny's® or the Red Lobster®' (though it might wish to tell them this in more diplomatic terms). Similarly, the customer is free to respond, 'A what charge? A service what?! That's it; I'm fucking off to Applebee's® etc.' You see, although it has escaped the author of Mallard Fillmore, when you buy a meal in a restaurant, you are entering into a contract. The restaurant is your counterparty. And parties are free to enter into contracts on mutually accepted terms -- or to decline the contract if the terms are not mutually acceptable.

Freedom to contract -- you'd think that a pretty basic value for an American conservative. And there was a time, once, when it would have been. Nowadays, though, it seems like what they like best is whingeing. Enough of them do, at any rate, to provide a living for the author of a not terribly well-drawn and distinctly unfunny comic strip. That's all right though. Nobody is requiring me to give the man any money; nobody is requiring me to read what he has to say.

While you are there, don't miss The Editors's post about dinosaurs. The post isn't really about dinosaurs, but they figure prominently enough that everybody can enjoy it.