Arthropoda - Blog Posts

something is wrong with my hamster

sensitive white boys

Even if a species of bug exhibits some kind of social touch among themselves (which I believe some are known to, though for the large majority of species I doubt there's any data on it), it's not going to be welcome from a towering colossus that they literally may not even be able to fit inside their whole field of vision. I feel like a lot of people forget just how big we are compared to most bugs

you know that one popular tumblr post that goes like "humans will pet anything" "well how wonderful that we live on a planet full of things that like to be petted!", or various other posts you see around the internet saying stuff like "humans evolved hands so we could pet all the animals 😌". sometimes I wonder how much those posts might have left actual lasting damage on public perception of animal behavior, like I'm sure they didn't intend to but like... did they

Well I certainly didn’t expect to illicit so many questions when I reblogged this post and added some tags about jumping spider content online.

Firstly, let me say there’s nothing wrong with keeping jumping spiders as pets. I have one myself. She’s a captive bred regal jumping spider. She’s currently a bit over two years old. I’ve had other jumping spiders as well, but they passed of old age and in one instance, a failed molt, which is fairly common.

Before and after getting pet jumpers, I joined some jumper groups, read a lot of care guides, and watched a slew of videos about keeping them.

It became obvious pretty quickly that apparently due to their cute fuzzy appearance, large round eyes, and intelligent behavior, people (owners, admirers, and popular content creators) assign human and mammal emotions and behaviors to them, often to their detriment.

I personally believe bugs are complex creatures that can be intelligent and have emotions, but that those emotions and behaviors are NOT analogous to human or mammal behavior and ignoring their natural needs and behaviors means you’re likely not providing proper care for them.

This is mainly about handling. Bugs don’t want to be handled. They get nothing positive out of it emotionally. They don’t want to be pet or cuddle with you. They don’t want to hang out with you. You’re a big scary predator, and it likely wants to get away from you. Forcing handling can stress, injure, or kill them. That’s why I tagged the post (linked above) “your spider is not a cat.” It doesn’t seek affection from you.

I can’t tell you how many posts or videos I saw where people were super upset because they let their jumper out of its enclosure to handle it and it either escaped and got lost or they somehow crushed it and killed or injured it badly. I’ve also seen people chasing their jumper around its enclosure trying to grab it or get it to jump onto their hand when it’s clearly just trying to hide.

As an example, a very common thing I’ve seen in videos about jumpers is people saying when they lift their front legs at you and jump or climb onto you/your hands it’s because they “want uppies” and want to be pet and be close to you. This is a wild misreading of behavior. Sometimes raising the front legs is a defensive display, trying to make itself look larger to scare away a threat. Other times, they’re waving their legs around to sense and feel their environment, or preparing to jump onto something. They are arboreal, and their natural behavior is to find a high vantage point, so climbing onto the big thing (you) nearby is normal. It’s not because it seeks your affection.

Certainly if you DO handle them frequently they can get used to it, and it becomes less stressful for them. But in my opinion the dangers outweigh any positives, and I don’t handle mine. These are wild animals that have not been domesticated, even when captive bred. If you want to give them enrichment, and you should, offer them prey to chase or interesting things to explore in a larger enclosure. For those that do still handle them, I’d encourage you to watch their behavior closely and read the spidery cues they’re giving you rather than assuming they’re feeling what a cute little mammal might be feeling in the same scenario.

I could go on with specifics about certain videos, but I wasn’t planning on writing a huge post and this is already long. Also I’m sure many people would disagree with me about some things I’ve said, and I’m not going to argue about anything. This is just how I feel based on what I’ve seen of online jumping spider content, and it’s why I no longer interact with most of it.

If your girl has

bulbous eyes

piercing-sucking mouthparts (beak)

raptorial legs

cogwheel-like structure

that’s not your girl that’s wheel bug!

(photo from this article)

oh oh speaking of fruit fly behavior, I hadn't seen it when I reblogged this post before but someone mentioned it in the tags— just last month there was a super super neat paper published describing play behavior in fruit flies! Basically they put a bunch of fruit flies in containers with food and a rotating carousel embedded in the floor (which they could walk on and off at will) and then used motion-tracking software to quantify how much time the flies spent time in different parts of the container and how they moved between them. The researchers found that while most of the flies avoided the carousel, quickly leaving after going on it, about a quarter of them would repeatedly walk onto the spinning carousel and stay there for extended durations, while spending less time visiting the food patch; in further trials, where the containers had two carousels which alternately spun and stopped every few minutes, carousel-seeking flies would often stay on one carousel until it stopped and then move to the other. (I don't think it'll embed here but see the link for a video of a fly going back and forth between the two carousels!)

The researchers interpret this as the flies having individual preferences for going on the carousel, and those who did go on it were doing so voluntarily and deliberately (as opposed to e.g. accidentally walking into it and getting trapped), seemingly just because they liked it. The really suggestive thing here is that the carousel-seeking flies would do this over food: as depicted in figure 2 of that paper, the researchers found that both the control-group flies (for whom the carousel was stationary) and the carousel-avoiding flies spent around 40% of their time visiting the food patch; in contrast, the flies who rode the carousels spent only half that time at the food patch, and instead spent 24% of the observed time riding the carousel. Obviously we don't know what emotions the flies might be feeling (the authors mention that a good line of follow-up research would be to look at how dopamine/reward pathways are involved in this behavior) but it appears that there is some kind of generally positive feeling that motivates them to do this, cuz yknow food is obviously something they need and want and yet they're choosing to do this instead. They hypothesize that this kind of “passive movement” play-like behavior observed in flies and other animals could functionally serve to ‘train’ their perceptive abilities (specifically, their sense of proprioception) by providing external sensory stimulation

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

their hair makes them look so round and fat

important anomalocaris dorsal carapace representation... the anomalocarapace...

sick and tired of inaccurate anomalocaris paleoart ,, decided to take matters into my own hands

we all know people who go out of their way to be rude on bug appreciation posts are annoying as heck but sometimes they manage to read the room so absurdly poorly that it's just funny. You'll see a photo with 200 notes by someone called "flylover4ever" with the caption "look at this beautiful blowfly I found on my morning bug hunt 😊" and every comment note and tag is something like "look at that coloring!" "what beautiful eyes you have 😍" "KISSING HER ON THE TERGAL PLATE" and then there's just one rando person being like "EWWW kill it with fire 🤮". And it's like how did you even get here. are you lost, where did you even come from

Oftentimes I see people just make shit up about bugs and other invertebrates. People will say stuff like "actually it's been scientifically proven that insects are physically incapable of cognition" with no source, and then you look it up and in fact there is tons and tons of literature reporting results on this exact thing. A while back after getting into an argument with people online about wasps, I decided to try compiling sources on invertebrate cognition out of spite and I had to take a break at some point because there is so much literature out there, it is actually overwhelming. Just with fruit flies alone, there's studies on how they form stable social networks and fight to establish hierarchies; how they make group decisions and act differently in crowds; how they pay attention to what other flies are doing and teach and learn from each other, even with other species. When subjected to pain out of their control, they can develop depression and respond to SSRIs to the point that they are literally used as animal models to study how to treat depression in humans. And that's just like, one animal!

Even with all the research there is though the truth is that we just haven't studied things like cognition, perception, behavior, sociality, etc. for the vast majority of invertebrates (i.e. the vast majority of animals). Most behavioral research (honestly, just bio research in general) is focused on vertebrates -- particularly mammals -- and the research that has been performed for invertebrates has still only been done for a small handful of species and lineages. Fruit flies are one of the single most studied organisms in the world (and there's still a lot we don't know about them). If idk, clams felt emotions, do you think you would be able to tell by just looking at them? (I have no idea if they do or not, I don't think anyone has studied this. we do know scallops can see.) But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and given the small glimpses of insight we have gotten into the vast world of unknowns, I think yeah it's pretty obvious that there is way more going on with a lot of animals than people think. Scala naturae my behated

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

these are the miserable remains of a chestnut weevil (Curculio elephas) who will never again feel the joy of a freshly drilled acorn after unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated upon her by me

this is her thirty seconds later. the atrocities that she miraculously recovered from included "being gently scooped up from a branch"

(September 1st, 2024)

This crab is under construction! Read more on the Aquarium's website. 🦀🦺

aquariumofpacific.org

Caring for Crustaceans with Creativity

An aquarist cares for crabs in need of new shells in a new, inventive way, by using non-toxic epoxy, molding, and paint.

Jumping spider mimic planthoppers in the genus Rhotana

Photo 1 by tenebrionidfan, 2 by gancw1, 3 by budak, and 4 by deeqld

@onenicebugperday found this cool lookin' bug at my local library the other day. I have no clue what it is, looks kinda like a bee or a wasp but a bit lankier, it looked like it was a bit less than 2 inches long, pretty big for bug standards. I love the white fluff around its neck!

Met this cool guy outside and then he broke into my house later that night

This is a robber fly known as a hanging thief so you know what he was doing in your home!! (Thieving)

bugs are always cleaning their damn antennas

I heard a commotion of buzzing in the long grass, so I went in there in my pajamas because I thought it might be a wasp attacking something (cool), but it was just a bottlefly getting upset because there was a sticky seed on his wing

pretty princesses

During the storm, I've had a wasp sheltering on my window.

It's been two days now, and she's still there, so I gave her some honey

Lookit her! slurping away!

@onenicebugperday

I saw this one paper where they made an artificial neural network based on the actual neural architecture of the fruit fly and trained it on pictures of flies to show that 1. individual fruit flies are visually distinct 2. they are probably able to differentiate between each other visually despite their vision being terrible. And as a comparison they had a bunch of experienced fly scientists (aka “flyentists”) try to identify the same pictures of flies and they failed miserably which I thought was really funny

This ability to re-identify flies across days opens experimental possibilities, especially considering that this performance was achieved with static images (16fps yields around a thousand estimates of ID per minute, allowing high confidence in the parsimonious correct identification). This is in contrast to the human ability to re-identify flies, which at low resolutions is barely better than chance.

Clearly, all models can learn to re-identify flies to some extent, underscoring the individual-level variation in D. melanogaster. Re-identifying flies is in fact easier for DCNs than CIFAR10 (at least with centred images of flies acquired at the same distance). Even the model that rivals, in some sense, the representational performance of humans does ten times better than humans. Why humans can’t tell one fly from another is not clear. Regardless of whether it was evolutionarily beneficial to discriminate individual flies, humans do have incredible pattern detection abilities. It may simply be a lack of experience (although we attempted to address this by only using experienced Drosophila researchers as volunteers) or a more cryptic pattern-recognition ‘blind-spot’ of humans. In either case, these findings should spur new experiments to further understand the mechanisms of human vision and experience and how they fail in this case.

these CRINGE scientists FAILED to identify flies that all our models could smho 🙄😤

Invertebrates are definitely capable of learning! A lot of people who don’t know anything about bugs say they’re automata who just do everything by instinct like an if-then computer program, and they absolutely have not looked into it because there’s SO much literature on invertebrate cognition including learning. One of the neatest papers I’ve seen was about Drosophila fruit flies (there’s a ton of fruit fly literature cuz they’re a common lab animal). So when a female fruit fly is exposed to parasitoid wasps, she will start laying fewer eggs. These researchers showed that fruit flies who have been exposed to wasps can communicate the presence of a threat via wing movements to other female fruit flies, and those flies will start laying fewer eggs too even if they haven’t seen the wasps at all, an example of social learning.

But what’s more: they can communicate threats like this not just with flies of their own species, but with flies of closely related species too. If the species are too distant, they stop being able to communicate as successfully HOWEVER these authors showed that if you house a bunch of flies together in mixed-species groups, afterwards their success at communicating goes up! This suggests the existence of a fruit fly “language” which differs between species, but which they’re capable of learning other species’ languages as well! Sources: 1, 2

see also this very scientific diagram from here:

One interesting thing about those studies is that they found that if you raise a fruit fly in isolation from hatching, it won’t be able to communicate as well. This suggests that there’s a critical period of socialization which flies require to learn how to do communicate properly and without it their ability to do so is impaired. (I believe there’s other studies on how other social interactions are affected by social isolation but I haven’t read them; again there’s sooo much fly literature ^^)

Another cool one I’ve seen is on antlion larvae, who hunt by digging pits and then waiting in the middle for ants and other bugs walking by to fall in. It’s generally thought that sedentary animals have fewer cognitive capabilities than mobile ones, due to their less demanding lifestyle, however these studies (which I’ve only skimmed) have been carried out which demonstrate that they are still capable of learning. Specifically, they can be taught to anticipate and identify approaching insects based on vibrations in the sand, and will subsequently adapt their behavior to hunt more efficiently! Even animals with what seems like a simple feeding behavior are still very capable of modifying it, which makes sense evolutionarily; while obviously different animals will require different levels of intelligence, you can imagine in a lot of cases that being able to modify your behavior based on experience is distinctly advantageous. Source 1, 2

Not an arthropod, but another bug that there’s been a lot of research into is Lymnaea pond snails, which are another common model organism for studying neurology and cognition. A ton of work has been done on their capabilities for associative learning, i.e. classical conditioning (“dog learns to salivate at the ring of a bell”) and operant conditioning (“rat learns that pressing a button gives food”). It’s been found that their ability to learn is actually a lot more complicated than just those simple kinds of stimulus ↔ response. They can take stuff they’ve learned in stressful situations (simulated experimentally by exposing them to the smell of crayfish, which eat snails) and generalize it to situations beyond just the original context, which you can imagine must be pretty important for surviving in the wild. Conversely, they can also place memories in context: when taught stuff in the presence of both crayfish smell and carrot smell, subsequently they will recall what they’ve learned in response to the carrot smell alone; in other words, they’re not just learning “carrot + crayfish smell”, but “carrot smell = crayfish smell”, placing their memories in the broader context of their environment (which again, must be helpful for survival). So they can not just learn but pretty flexibly as well! Sources 1, 2, 3

This isn't a bug at all but pretty recently there was a study that found that box jellyfish are capable of associative learning. This one research lab has done a lot of work into vision in the Caribbean box jellyfish (they have eyes btw) on both a behavior and a neurological level and have found a lot of cool things, like that these box jellyfish use their vision to navigate through their habitat of mangrove forests, and that though they don't have a brain as such, they do have a central nervous system in the form of a ring nerve connecting four small clusters of neurons that process and combine input from their eyes. I can't actually read the paper (paywall :P) but last year they did an experiment where they put jellies in a tank with darkened bars on the glass to simulate mangrove roots. Normally the jellies gauge the distance to a root by how dark it appears and then swim around it when they get near; however the bars in the experiment were colored so that they looked like they were farther away than the wall actually was. At first the jellyfish kept bumping into the all, but after several rounds of trial and error they began to avoid them, indicating that they were able to learn from the experience! Jellyfish! Aaaaa nature is so cool. Source 1, 2, 3

I have a question! About bugs and arachnids and all them. Sorry to lump them all into one category, but I'd rather not make the same post multiple times.

My question is: Can they learn "tricks?"

By this I mean are they capable of learning, in general, I suppose. Like mice in a maze, magpies with a rock.

Also, what sorts of things have they learned? How do they learn (like watching others or from experience)?

I ask because it's something that really interests me. I know the ability to learn doesn't add or subtract value from a being, it's a curious thought as I know very, very little about beetles, and spiders, and bees, and so on!

Do they just know how to do things because it's all their kind have done since the beginning of them? Do they have to learn or are capable of it?