It’s things like this that make you really consider how crazy evolution is. Hornless spiders were just getting d chomped on by birds, and this guy’s randomly mutant ancestor happens to appear with some little knobs or whatnot that made him sightly less optimal as a bird snack. He lives long enough to pass on the knob gene.
Knobby spiders thrive, but then they’re out there still getting eaten by birds, maybe a little less often, until some new mutant shows up with even longer, pointier, little knobbies, and the birds are like “fuck that shit”, so that guy gets to reproduce with even greater success than his little-knobbed cousins.
And so on and so on for countless generations until you get this little eight-legged wishbone out there telling birds to fucking try it and find out.
Neatest thing in the world, specialization.
It’s things like this that make you really consider how crazy evolution is. Hornless spiders were just getting d chomped on by birds, and this guy’s randomly mutant ancestor happens to appear with some little knobs or whatnot that made him sightly less optimal as a bird snack. He lives long enough to pass on the knob gene.Knobby spiders thrive, but then they’re out there still getting eaten by birds, maybe a little less often, until some new mutant shows up with even longer, pointier, little knobbies, and the birds are like “fuck that shit”, so that guy gets to reproduce with even greater success than his little-knobbed cousins.And so on and so on for countless generations until you get this little eight-legged wishbone out there telling birds to fucking try it and find out.Neatest thing in the world, specialization.