Today I learned about the Vampire Spider, Evarcha culicivora. I was dubious at first. Spiders don’t have the piercing mouthparts most blood drinkers have; also, venom isn’t going to be particularly useful in slurping blood from a cow or whatever. But then I saw their color scheme, and obviously, this is how a vampire should dress.
Red and black, very tasteful.
Then I learned how they do it. They’re drinking blood indirectly — they wait to catch Anopheles mosquitos that have just had a blood meal, and then do the normal feeding behavior of spiders, killing and injecting them with venom and enzymes and sucking up their guts, it’s just that they like their bug juice with a bit of mammalian marinara.
As a bonus, the spiders find the scent of blood to be an aphrodisiac.
Halloween is in 5 weeks, are you ready?
Halloween decorations have been in the stores for at least a month.
I’m already seeing Thanksgiving decorations as well.
Which means that, in a few weeks we will start seeing Holiday/Xmas decorations.
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays.
Don’t forget the War on the War on Halloween.
The fundie xians hate Halloween, supposedly because it features witches and ghosts. It’s more likely they hate Halloween because their religion is based on hate and they hate everything.
In my school district, they managed to get the public schools to stop having Halloween decorations and parties. They are now generic harvest celebrations.
They also managed to get the public schools to stop having Xmas decorations and parties as well. The district said, OK, no Halloween, no Xmas. You can’t claim they are religious holidays and prohibit one and not the other.
It’s now a generic Holiday season.
That’s one badass spider
Does it taste like pumpkin spice?
@raven
Ha!
your school district, to try to avoid preferring one religious celebration over another has instead gone back to the pagan roots of those holidays. they are catering to Celtic and Druidic religions instead!
… they wait to catch Anopheles mosquitos that have just had a blood meal, and then do the normal feeding behavior of spiders…
Seems a rather precarious niche – depending on catching a particular kind of bug at a particular (short) point in its lifecycle must leave a lot of Evarcha culicivora staring hungrily as their less specialized cousins chow down.
Indeed – and how do you specialize in catching these blood-swolled mosquitoes? If you were a flying or otherwise fast-moving predator, you could hang out near the moving large animals that mosquitoes feed on. But a small flightless spider?
Mosquitoes take a blood meal in order to nourish their eggs. So perhaps the spiders plant their webs near the kinds of sites where mosquitoes lay eggs (low, damp spots) hoping to catch some that just fed and are on their way to such a spot.
This is a jumping spider. They don’t make webs, they actively hunt for prey. There is more info at the link.
So they smell the blood, and then use their eyes to determine which mosquito is full with the blood they can smell.