the most base human desire is just to do stuff with strings. weaving. cooking spaghetti. quantum physics. embroidery. uhh lacing your shoes to go on a run. a lot of instruments. knitting
All spiders in the Portia genus are fascinating because of how much they accomplish with so little. They’re all tiny little jumping spiders, mostly under one centimeter, so they have tiny little brains.
Most Portia spiders have a brain of only 600,000 neurons, which is physically much smaller than the head of a pin. This forces them to think rather slowly from our point of view, but compared to their prey, they’re devastatingly brilliant.
For example, many jumping spiders are know to take detours when stalking prey. Portia spiders are notable for taking very long detours that break line of sight, which means they must remember and predict where the prey will be when they arrive.
When hunting sedentary web-building spiders, which usually have poor vision, a Portia spider will mimic a bit of leaf or bark to get into attack range. They only move forward during light breezes that shake the web enough to hide their footsteps. If the target moves to defend itself, Portia will disengage, retreat, and try again.
If they can’t get a good approach, they have also been recorded mimicking the vibrations of a trapped insect, or a male spider’s mating dance, to lure the prey spider into attack range. One Portia Fimbriata, the fringed jumping spider, was observed using trial and error to vibrate a target web for three days, repeating any pattern that caused the prey spider to move closer.
In places where other spiders aren’t common enough to be reliable prey, Portia adapts. They’ve been witnessed scavenging and even consuming nectar from flowers. They also innovate new tactics to hunt insects. For example, many insects freeze and stand motionless to avoid predators. Portia spiders counter this by guessing where the prey is and jumping nearby, which often scares the target into breaking cover and running. Then Portia can spot it and resume the normal detour-and-ambush routine.
The population native to Queensland, Australia is particularly inventive. They’re known to drop down on target spiders from above, a tactic called “swooping”. While all other Portia gladly jump into target spider webs, the Queensland orb weaver Argiope Appensa discourages them by shaking the web violently, which disrupts their normal techniques. Swooping counters this defense.
They also use a unique walking gait, slow and robotic, when hunting other saltacid jumping spiders with large forward-facing eyes. They freeze and depend on their natural camouflage whenever the target looks directly at them, so we suspect they prey may not even recognize them as living creatures. Portia rarely uses this “cryptic stalking” technique against any other prey.
Portia Africanus appeared to be a comparatively bad hunter at first glance, but that was in lab testing with 1v1 combat. In the wild, this spider hunts in packs.
Yes, really. They form social groups that hunt cooperatively and sometimes share prey. Groups of mixed ages and sexes will gang up outside the nest of a target spider. They prevent the target from entering or leaving and surround them until one of the Portia, usually a juvenile, manages to lunge forward and bite.
I don’t know why but this makes me think about that one post that’s like “if the uncanny valley was a defense mechanism then what exactly were we hunted by for so long that that evolved?”
Neanderthals. Homo Sapiens isn’t the only species of hominid that evolved on earth, there were several at the same time in the same places. Our ancestors are the ones who won the war. For thousands of years, something that was almost human but not quite was the most dangerous threat you could encounter.
There’s also evidence in our genetics of a lot of crossbreeding going on between early humans and the neanderthals, which may very well explain the tendency in modern humans to be sexually attracted to monsters.
As such, I propose we rename ‘the uncanny valley’ to ‘the fight or fuck response’.
people talk all the time about “primal instincts” and it’s usually about violence or sexual temptations or something, but your humanity comes with a lot of different stuff that we do without really thinking about, that we do without being told to or prompted to
your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:
Befriend
Tell story
Make Thing
Investigate
Share knowledge
Laugh
Sing
Dance
Empathize with
Create
we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands
your primal instincts are not bathed in blood- they are layered in people telling stories to each other around a fire over and over and putting devices together through trial and error over and over and reaching for someone and something every moment of the way
~“Your primal instincts are not bathed in blood.”
My god this is beautiful. Such a refreshing change of pace to the constant glorification of instinctual human violence.
Pieces of Viking pottery with traces of cat and dog paws, seen at the Musée de Normandie in Caen Castle
“So back in the day pets already ruined their owner’s artwork.” – My sis who took the photo
“ruined”? made better
It’s very humanizing to imagine some poor potter in the past screaming “nnnnooooooo bad kitty” somewhere in Scandinavia
If it was ruined, the artisan wouldn’t have baked it.
That’s… that’s a delightful point you just made.
This person chose to bake and keep their cat’s artistic contribution.
i was in spain once and there was a building with a tile that had been laid down in roman times: it had a dog’s paw print. and the thing was that after the dog did that print, the wet tile was dried, and then fired, and then shipped, and then laid, and for two thousand years every person who encountered that tile thought ‘aw! paw print!’ and kept it. this vast agreement by thousands of people over all these centuries, in memory of a dog only one of us could have met.
i think it’s so sweet that humans draw hearts everywhere. that’s not even what a heart looks like and yet here we are… scrawling them in the margins of the notes we take in class, tracing them in glass that’s misted over. on our friends’ hands in sharpie, in the sand at the beach. fashioning them out of leaves or twigs or bits of grass on the sidewalk. in chalk and dry erase marker. with our hands, when someone’s taking a photo of us. very cute ❣️
the human hand is actually really bizarrely shaped compared to the rest of the apes!
human palms are comparatively much shorter than an ape’s, with shorter and broader fingers.
and this is specifically because humans just started chucking spears at other animals one day and never stopped.
early homonid species actually had very ape-like hands, but they started evolving to be more like we have today the second that early homonids started using tools on a regular basis!
as you know if you’ve ever seen that video of the orangutang hammering nails into a plank of wood, ape hands are SHIT at fine motor control.
the human hand is architecturally maximized for fine control of tools, from spears to knives to car keys!
but Chimpanzees probably still think your hands are really weird and gross.
i found out that twin baby boys were separated and adopted out. When reunited years later, they found out they were both named James, had married a woman named Linda, divorced and married Betty and both had a son named James Allen.
They took part in a studyconducted by Dr. Thomas Bouchard of the University of Minnesota, who found that their medical histories and brain-wave tests were almost identical. So too were their results in a personality test. (x)
ifesbob 