onenicebugperday:African social spiders, Stegodyphus dumicola, Eresidae (velvet spiders)Found i
onenicebugperday:African social spiders, Stegodyphus dumicola, Eresidae (velvet spiders)Found in Central and Southern Africa, this species is one of very few that live a social lifestyle in a large, shared nest surrounded by web for catching prey.Colonies can consist of tens to hundreds of spiders, of which only an average of 12% is male. Some females reproduce while some do not, but all help care for spiderlings until the end of their lives when they are eventually consumed by the young spiders in an act known as matriphagy. Some individuals disperse when they reach maturity to start new nests and diversify genetics with other colonies.In the first four photos above, females work together to dismember prey caught in their web.Read more here.Photos 1-5 by wynand_uys, 6-7 by hrodulf, and 8-10 by Bernard Dupont man, now i want to figure out a sentient alien species who has this same lifecycle. you grow up in a community where everyone’s your mom (with maybe a few rare dads) but when you hit puberty, you and your closest cohorts gotta pick a grandma to suck all the blood out of so you can become an adult. it’d be horrifying to us but i can see it being a highly emotional religious ceremony, with the weird cultural quirk of, barring injury, everyone knows how and roughly when they’ll die. depending on how they felt about being eaten, it also gives the younger generation some leverage or influence against the older one. would you be more likely to be chosen to be eaten if you were mean and nasty or if you were widely and deeply beloved?? honestly a lot of our problems would be solved if a pack of teen zoomers had a biological and cultural imperative to eat old politicans -- source link
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