Thursday, September 20, 2012

Someone thinks this is funny...

The Hawaiian Happy-Face Spider (Theridion grallator) is a highly polymorphic species, producing a multitude of patterns on its abdomen, many which uncannily resemble the "yellow smiley-face" we all know from our youth. What's this all about? The prevalent theory is that the high likelihood of a pattern variant will help stop pattern recognition from predators, in
this case forest birds. But why the smiley-faces? Less than one-half of the spiders of this species have a smiley-face variant anyways, the spiders are incredibly small and not a worthy meal to most predators, and they hide under leaves during the day when any potential predators would be hunting. Scientists are hard-pressed to find an adaptive reason for the smiley-faces and are mostly left with the impression that nature just told a really good joke.

There are many impressive photos of this species on the internet. Spend some time laughing...

A scientist's anecdote: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5199409/British-scientists-study-Hawaiian-happy-face-spider.html

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