Acid-Spraying, Lobster-Like Arachnids Emerge in Texas to Look for Love

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

And I thought all of the Devil's pets lived in Australia.

In the West Texas desert, summer rains usually cause wildflowers to sprout and cacti blooms to burst forth.

They also result in the emergence of “land lobsters from hell,” reports Abigail Rosenthal of the Houston Chronicle. More commonly known as vinegaroons, this unusual creature isn’t a actually crustacean—it’s an arachnid. The eight-legged critter has a nasty bite and sprays a vinegar-like acid from its tail. According to a Big Bend National Park Facebook post, summer rains bring the amorous arachnids out of their burrows in search of love and food.

Acid-Spraying, Lobster-Like Arachnids Emerge in Texas to Look for Love

Summer rains send vinegaroons scurrying from their burrows in the desert

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[Bootney Lee Farnsworth]

Acid-Spraying, Lobster-Like Arachnids Emerge in Texas to Look for Love​

Did those vote-dodging assholes finally come back from their frolic to DC?

 

[toobfreak]

And I thought all of the Devil's pets lived in Australia.

Are they good eating? Where can I get some to try? Do they go good with butter, and have they found DrLove yet?

 

[Bootney Lee Farnsworth]

"Texas A&M recommends letting the arachnids live since they eat other bugs like millipedes, scorpions, crickets and cockroaches. Big Bend National Park officials report vinegaroons hunt by sensing the vibrations of prey with their long front legs."

Listen to us. We know what we're talking about,

 

[ClaireH]

And I thought all of the Devil's pets lived in Australia.

No kidding. Similarly, just yesterday I read an article about “don’t confuse the cicadas for the killer hornets”. My area has the harmless, yet noisy as hell, cicadas come out every year for about two weeks along with their every 10 or 20 year mega-convention held for extra cicada communications lol

 

[MisterBeale]

"Texas A&M recommends letting the arachnids live since they eat other bugs like millipedes, scorpions, crickets and cockroaches. Big Bend National Park officials report vinegaroons hunt by sensing the vibrations of prey with their long front legs."

Listen to us. We know what we're talking about,

. . . but according to reports, I thought we were trying to save the insects, b/c without them, we may suffer from ecological collapse?

Maybe we need to crush them all?

https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/insect-decline-germany/index.html

More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

Global declines in insects have sparked wide interest among scientists, politicians, and the general public. Loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to provoke cascading effects on food webs and to jeopardize ecosystem services. Our understanding of the extent and underlying causes of...

journals.plos.org

"Global declines in insects have sparked wide interest among scientists, politicians, and the general public. Loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to provoke cascading effects on food webs and to jeopardize ecosystem services. Our understanding of the extent and underlying causes of this decline is based on the abundance of single species or taxonomic groups only, rather than changes in insect biomass which is more relevant for ecological functioning. Here, we used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96 unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna. Our analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study. We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline. This yet unrecognized loss of insect biomass must be taken into account in evaluating declines in abundance of species depending on insects as a food source, and ecosystem functioning in the European landscape."

 

[Moonglow]

"Texas A&M recommends letting the arachnids live since they eat other bugs like millipedes, scorpions, crickets and cockroaches. Big Bend National Park officials report vinegaroons hunt by sensing the vibrations of prey with their long front legs."

Listen to us. We know what we're talking about,

Aggies get lost in a dust storm from bailing hay, news at eleven....