Alrighty peeps!
I love blogging but have always stuck within the safe boundaries of myspace to do it! I've decided to venture out (code for copy the cool peeps on twitter) and use a blogging website!
At this very moment I am curled up in a ball on the couch, covered in a fine sheen of sweat and sick as a dog with some sort of stomach plague!! Yet I'm still determined to get my little blogspot up and running so I'll start it out by giving you a little glimpse into my twisted mind via a few of my favorite myspace blogs!! I do something called "slow news day blogs" Slow news days are my favorite because there is not an abundance of death and destruction and often you can find great and sometimes odd little stories that were used to fill the media pages!!
So before I do another set of pepto body shots I present to you, the spider sex blog!
Spider Sex - You know it’s a slow news day when.... Current mood: ditzy
I don't know anyone who could see that title and not click on the link! When I see a headline like this, I know that it's a slow news day and I love slow news days for two reasons. 1) A headline like this one means that we don't have a tragic new death toll for our soldiers that day. AND 2)The goofy space fillers they come up with make me giggle. I will post the article bellow but I needed to interject a few thoughts first.......
Who wakes up one morning and thinks to themselves "I would really love to study spider sex!" ?
Is this something you aspire to as a child??? I can just see that parent teacher conference now....."Well, we asked the children to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up and little Billy drew this.....at first we thought that the spiders were fighting.....but....."
Maybe it is simply a dream job for pervy scientists......
Keep in mind that I HATE SPIDERS!!! But if I had to spend my days sitting in a lab watching them get it on, I would at least make it interesting!! First of all I would try to figure out what each spider was into then put them into the right groups. For the kinky spiders, I would fill their tanks with tiny racks, 8 cuffed shackles and don't forget the tiny riding crops!
For the romantic spiders, I would sprinkle rose petals around their tanks, hang scarves over their heat lamps...for mood lighting.....and pop in a Puccini cd!
My favorites would by far be the little porn star spiders! I would line their tanks with zebra or leopard print faux fir, drop in a tiny rotating bed, hang a disco ball then for kicks add my own BOOM CHICA BOW WOW sound track!!
This is what I do to amuse myself with the crazy scary world we live in. Lord knows, we need more slow news days! :-)
Oh, and on another note, the article mentions virgin female spiders.....How do they know for sure that she is a virgin....she may be lying to protect her reputation......That she-spider may be a real hose beast!!! You just can't trust spiders!!!
Oh, and on another note, the article mentions virgin female spiders.....How do they know for sure that she is a virgin....she may be lying to protect her reputation......That she-spider may be a real hose beast!!! You just can't trust spiders!!!
This is said article
In sex life of jumping spiders, size matters
PARIS (AFP) - From post-coital cannibalism to love at first sight, the sex life of the African jumping spider is full of surprises, according to a new study.
But none is more unexpected than this, say researchers who studied the blood-gorging Evarcha culicivora up close and personal: while virgin females are attracted to meatier mates, a bit of experience sees them switch to smaller partners.
In this and other ways, the jumping spider, native to East Africa, is in a class of its own when it comes to sex, according to a study in the current issue of the scientific journal Ethology.
For starters, both males and females play a roughly equal role in choosing partners, an aberration in the eight-legged world of Arachnida.
That equal opportunity behavior extends to two-way cannibalism as well, with males consuming their loved ones only slightly more often as the reverse.
For spiders that go in for that sort of thing, females gobbling up their sex partners is the norm.
Another finding that surprised a team of researchers led by Simon Pollard, a biologist at the Cantebury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, was that E. culicivora -- armed with eye-sight "unrivalled by other animals in their size range" -- picks its partner based on looks and size alone.
And here is where things get strange.
Female adult African jumping spiders vary in size between three and six millimetres, while males range between four and seven, giving rise to the possibility of larger males mating with smaller females and vice versa.
In a series of laboratory experiments, Pollard showed that in three of four possible scenarios, an individual E. culicivora preferred a partner with an extra millimetre or two on its frame.
Virgin females, along with both experienced and inexperienced males, were all more than twice as likely to opt for a meatier mate.
But females that had copulated once before saw things differently: two out of three made a bee-line for the smallest male in sight.
"It is as though females start out prepared to take the risk in choosing larger males," knowing they may be eaten as a post-sex snack, Pollard notes in the study. "And then, once mated, they become less inclined to take the risk again."
But exactly why experienced females prefer to practice "safer sex" the second time around, admits Pollard, "is currently unknown."
To test his hypothesis that E. culicivora makes mate-choice decision based on looks alone, Pollard perched two life-like embalmed specimens of different sizes in come-hither postures inside a large cage, with a single plastic tube leading from an entryway to each one.
The researchers made sure that the spider choosing between the two had a gander at both potential partners before counting the results, which showed that decisions were based on static looks alone.
To ensure that other factors were not coming into play, they repeated the experiment, but this time with live spiders. The results were the same.
The African jumping spider feeds mainly on small lake flied and blood-gorged female mosquitos, which means that vertebrate blood is an important part of their diet.
