on island living
trying to be cool abd natural
1sr line of defence,adainst flies,in my caravan ha
srill ponderi ngh
n over t
wt.... as close as
irony,is it
not nostalgia,but close enough/related,by downunder standards ha,WT ..
How tarantulas conquered the globe
8 legs are made for walking, apparently.
Despite often being cast as the terrifying creature in pop culture, tarantulas, or theraphosids, are not actually aggressive. They're homebodies, preferring to spend their time in their burrows with their families. Females and their young hardly ever leave home, and males only go out to mate. Stay away from them, and they'll stay away from you. This makes tarantulas' presence on six out of seven continents something of a mystery. How did such non-adventurous creatures end up in so many places? A new study published in the journal PeerJ from a team of international researchers provides the answer: They walked there as they rafted across the earth atop drifting continental masses.
The lead author of the study is Carnegie Mellon University's Saoirse Foley, whose team included researchers from Universität Trier in Germany and Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Together, they conducted a wide-ranging analysis of 48 spider transcriptomes, a compilation of RNA transcripts inside of cells. The researchers used the transcriptomes to construct a "family tree" and time-calibrated it using software and fossil data. The data goes back 120 million years to the Cretaceous period. The research revealed that tarantula migration wasn't just a matter of riding the pieces of the Gondwana supercontinent as it split—the spiders may have done some dispersing through the areas in which they found themselves, with groups heading in opposite directions and some choosing trees over ground life. Two groups that landed in Asia were separated by 20 million years.
Read the full article
here.
ps
arbie,been upsetting the lpsg applecart since 2007 ha
USA commandering perhaps huh