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More Species of Hokey Pokey Dancing Spiders Found and Registered

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 23 2018, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the shake-your-tail-feathers dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

New Peacock Spiders Discovered:

On a trip trudging through the wet and cold of southern Western Australia last year, Jurgen Otto rediscovered a dancing spider dubbed the Hokey Pokey.

And in the process, he stumbled across a species never before classified.

Along with his colleague David Knowles, Dr Otto has discovered most of the 70 known species of peacock spider — and he loves them.

It's because, he says, they're more like dogs or cats, or people, than spiders.

"They're very charming animals. They've got these big eyes, and it's very easy to like them ... I've often compared them to puppies and kittens."

"They're curious, they get excited, they push themselves up on their legs to see better, they crouch down and hide.

"They're not like a grasshopper or something that just doesn't show any [emotion], they're more like us than other invertebrates."

[...] In a paper published this week in the journal Pekhamia [PDF-88.7MB], Dr Otto and his colleague David Hill officially gave a name to the Hokey Pokey: Maratus tortus, with "tortus" being Latin for "twisted".

[...] He's put together a website in his spare time with photos documenting each of the species.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @09:13PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @09:13PM (#711443)

    The rule in Australia is that if it lives outside and has eyes, it'll kill you.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @09:20PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @09:20PM (#711447)

    Death by kookaburra!?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @09:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @09:28PM (#711450)

      They attack lizard people.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by archfeld on Monday July 23 2018, @10:10PM

    by archfeld (4650) <treboreel@live.com> on Monday July 23 2018, @10:10PM (#711462) Journal

    LOL That sounds like the general rule here in Arizona as well. If it survives here it has huge thorns, is venomous or poisonous. One of scariest thing you can do here is to go outside in the wee hours with an ultraviolet (black light) and see the desert floor fluoresce. Scorpions in particular glow at night when exposed to UV light. The desert crawls.

    --
    For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @12:00AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @12:00AM (#711490)

    Look at the size https://www.peacockspider.org/size/ [peacockspider.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @12:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @12:07AM (#711492)

    Or it's edible.