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

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.


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  • (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.

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