#sun spiders

empty threats don't bother me, but "i hope you find a lifer at half past eight in the evening with no external light source on you" is scary. it can happen. fortunately, this iberian solifuge (Gluvia dorsalis) turned out to be cuter in motion in a shitty blurry high ISO phone video than it would've been in any decent photos i couldn't have taken

I really like them. They're like that because they can't eat solid food and didn't develop venom like spiders and their pedipalps are sensory and don't help them eat like scorpions.

So they just have their chelicerae for liquifying their food, no big arms, no chemicals, no hollow sucking fangs to help. So they have huge chelicerae, they're still claws unlike spider chelicerae so it looks like they have 4 fangs. But most arachnids have claw mouth parts, they're just very small. Scorpions have 2 pairs of claws, the big pedipalp claw arms and the tiny little chelicerae face claws that are harder to see.

So sulfugidae just have to use their giant face claws to knead their prey into a slurpable pulp. Like me when I want to drink and iceblock. They also have huge muscles on their face that are part of the chelicerae like some spiders. This is like the only flaw arachnids have, their eating tube has to go past their giant brain into their second mody segment so they eat slowly. Insects can just munch stuff.

And they have giant pedipalps that look like a 5th pair of legs and hair for sensory purposes since they're almost blind.

today's drawing is another bit of mimicry-trickery...

the spider-tailed horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) has an appendage on its tail that REMARKABLY mimics an arachnid. it even jitters it in a little figure-eight to copy the movements. to me, it looks kind of like a solifuge? which are found in almost all desert biomes.

if my first encounter with Gluvia dorsalis was a frantic attempt to photograph a busy individual under very low light, it makes sense that fate, in all its creativity, would make the second one a much smaller baby in an absurdly bright area. to some this might seem like a cruel prank, but as far as i'm concerned it was a cruel prank that allowed me to see two solifuges