SPIDER SURPRISE
upon the squirrel’s head and body, thus assisting it to escape their jaws when fleeing. As for any bloodthirsty dietary preferences, in reality the tufted ground squirrel consumes nothing more dramatic than nuts and the seeds of the cheeseweed, though it certainly needs powerful jaws in order to bite through their tough shells. so its ability to bite fiercely if need be may be the origin of superstitious local claims that it is a savage bloody-fanged vampire. http://news.sciencemag.org/plantsanimals/2015/09/vampire-squirrelcaught-film 2 Sept 2015. staying on the subject of bloody fangs: A few months ago, Australian National University ecologist mark Wong was spending a day in New south Wales’s Tallaganda state Forest observing spiders when he flipped over a stone and spied a burrow that he recognised as belonging to sutherland’s funnel-web spider Atrax sutherlandi – a venomous species formally described by science as recently as 2010. Idly poking a stick into its burrow, Wong expected to see a spider with a glossy black back, a deep brown or plumcoloured belly, and black fangs (cheliceræ) emerge. Consequently, he was very surprised indeed when the spider that did emerge, and very aggressively too, sported a blood-red belly. Even more startling – and decidedly strange – was that one of its fangs was also bright scarlet, looking as if it too had been freshly dipped in blood. Its overall morphology confirmed that this specimen was indeed a sutherland’s funnel-web, but none displaying its bizarre coloration had ever been recorded before. so Wong captured this anomalous arachnid and brought it back with him to his laboratory at the university. sadly, it later died, but its red-hued riddle lives on, because arachnologists have so far been unable to explain why its belly and one of its fangs were blood-red. They suspect that it is a genetically induced freak specimen, its extraordinary coloration due to the expression of a hitherto-undocumented mutant gene form (allele). It could be of no useful visual benefit to this spider, however, because its species is solitary, spends much of its life in total darkness within its burrow, and has very poor eyesight. might its coloration be of external origin, however, with some form of red substance encountered by the spider having stained its belly and fangs? I wonder if anyone has examined the inside of its burrow in case any such substance is present there? At the moment, the mystery of the scarletfanged spider remains unsolved. http://news. nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150902spiders-animals-australia-science-world/ 3 Sept 2015.