The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation. That way they’ll all be in one place. This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs.
“Oh my god is this complexity ever going to end?” thought zoologist Wayne Maddison in 1974, when he first witnessed the elaborate courtship dance of the male jumping spider. The answer, as Maddison and our guest poster Anne Casselman discovered, is no. No, it is not. Read the skinny on the Salticidae shimmy here.
It was another awesome week on LWON. At least we think so.
I took my place at the gray table in the gray, poorly-lit room, meeting the gaze of the eyeless skull staked upright before me. A stiff rectangular block of white wax was my only material, and a simple metal implement, sharp like a scalpel on one end and rounded like a spoon on the other, my only tool—other than my own hands and head, once full of vertebrate anatomy knowledge, now less so. To my right, another student, a painter, ripped wax from his block and manipulated it. My weak hands couldn’t get a grip.