#insect phoresy i mean | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

crevicedwelling · 4 months

Note

taxonomic nightmare but may i request a chelicerate order ranking

sticking with extant ones, here.

Amblypygi - S

my little tree flatcrab spindle angels. maybe other arachnids have chemically interesting venom or are more colorful (amblys can do gray!! and sometimes brown) but amblys are really just suited to my tastes. long-living with both sexes having indeterminate growth, spiny, fast, nonvenomous, arboreal/scansorial, curiously social, and they just look great.

Alfonso says hi.

Thelyphonida & Schizomida — Uropygi? - A

great bugs for most of the reasons shared with above, being fairly closely related to amblys. vinegaroons are the tanks of the tetrapulmonates, built to burrow and clobber things with their freakishly muscular pedipalps. schizomids are very funny guys that deserve better. each group took “ain’t broke, don’t fix” even more literally than the amblypygi and truly all look identical; if you hid arachnologists’ microscopes there’d be a crisis.

Solifugae - A

fast, furious, fluffy: I love these little (and not-so-little) freaks. again, doing it all without venom, their crazy snipping chelicerae are some of my favorite insect anatomy. plus, they’re bizarrely diverse, from the mouth-on-legs of the rhagodids to the classic camel spider look and then there’s the hexisopodids that look like angry fur pillows.

Opiliones - A

there’s so much more to these than the ball-on-sticks (though that’s iconic!) that I used to think they all were. ornate armor and parental care (paternal, in some cases!) from the Laniatores, spindly guys abound, alien drone robots from Dyspnoi (Trogulus), and then whatever pudgy little Siro has got going on. possibly the most creative use of pedipalps, with funky lobster claws, bear trap spike-hell, “spoons?” (cosmetids), pinchy bits, glue traps, and spare leg all represented.

Araneae - B

sure. spiders are cool. everyone knows what a spider is. points for diversity, points for bizarre forms, yeah yeah. can we go home now? also, webs are cheating.

if it was only Liphistius, they’d get an A.

Ricinulei - ????

mysterious. elusive. built like a baked bean. what are they even doing? we don’t know. pay researchers more

Pseudoscorpiones - B

great bunch of little guys! phoresy is fun, and so are venomous crabby pedipalps. they have the best element of surprise—never know where you’ll find them next. in a book? under bark? in a beetle? lots of points for weird social lifestyles in certain species and associated chemical mimicry, plus all the wacky insular species and host specialists.

Scorpiones - C

they’re like pseudoscorpions, only less so. cute in a very dopey way. learning that a scorpion’s anus is at the tip of the tail ruined them for me forever.

Palpigradi - D

adorable but they’re not really doing anything let’s be honest. and I love them for that. you do you little eyeless guys I’m sure I’ll find you someday in the dirt

Acari/Parasitiformes - S

aha! I bet you thought I’d rank them poorly, but no, mites are the best arachnids (though not my personal favorites). if you disagree with that, it probably means you don’t know enough about them. mites can do anything and you are a fool if you doubt them.

yes, this includes ticks. ticks are cool and if you have an issue with this—sounds like a vertebrate problem

~~~~~under the water~~~~~

Xiphosura - C

overrated. great, and I love them, but just slightly overrated. stop stealing their blood pls

class Pycgnogonida - ????

Huh? What?

What? I don’t know. Maybe.

#creature rankings

54 notes · View notes

bogleech · 4 years

Note

THATS what theyre called? why does no one ever talk abt pseudoscorpions theyre so cool and i love them but know NOTHING abt them

Well then here is almost EVERYTHING about pseudoscorpions!!!!

Pseudoscorpions were among the first creatures to ever exist on land and are their own group of arachnids distinct from mites, spiders and true scorpions, but like scorpions a pseudoscorpion has eight legs plus a set of palps (manipulatory mouthparts) enlarged into giant lobster-like arms! Though they don’t have a stinging tail, the pincers are venomous, helping paralyze fast-moving prey such as springtails and mites! They’re found almost everywhere in the world, but we seldom see them because they’re small enough to live down between grains of soil and the cracks of tree bark. I think even the largest pseudoscorpions in the world are still barely larger than grains of rice.

It used to be that they were a little more familiar to people, though, under the name BOOK SCORPION. That’s because, before their materials were more chemically treated and synthetic, not to mention before indoor climate control caught on, it was more common for books to build up microscopic fungi and in turn support a whole community of fauna such as book lice, and the one predator that could most easily slip between the pages of a book to hunt book lice was a pseudoscorpion! They would have been apex predators of this completely unique man-made ecosystem! I’ve said this before but isn’t it wild to think of a whole biome that exists in nothing but a book? Things living out entire struggles having no idea their world is just a neglected piece of information storage for incomprehensible giants??? Is that us?? Is our universe something else’s cookbook it forgot to clean????????? I mean I hope it’s at least as dignified as a cookbook, I hope we aren’t one of the smutty magazine universes or something. Actually even that wouldn’t be so bad compared to the possibility that we’re some equivalent to “windows 95 for dummies” that nobody could ever possibly need again.

ANYWAY when a pseudoscorpion wants to travel, it engages in phoresy, meaning it grabs on to another animal strictly for transportation. It will wait around with its limbs outstretched, like a tick, until anything moving comes by and just hitch a ride with one of its pincers! This most often ends up being larger insects, so it rides around a while and then just drops off wherever. (thank you Tom Murray for this photo! Lots of other good ones if you just google “pseudoscorpion phoresy” )

Pseudoscorpions actually have a courtship ritual, which hasn’t been well documented due to their small size, but it seems that most species basically WALTZ! They “join hands” and slowly walk around together, until the female either lets go and shoos the male away or she’s comfortable dancing long enough for him to drop a tiny sperm packet on the ground and dance her over it.

Pseudoscorpions also produce silk, like some other arachnids, but they use it only defensively. Various species will spin a little cocoon-like shelter to wait out harsh seasons, protect their young, or even mate in. And that’s everything I know about pseudoscorpions off the top of my head!

#biology #animals

2K notes · View notes