Pioneering spidernaut snuffs it after short Smithsonian stay America's first spacefaring jumping spider has died, three days after being delivered for display in her new home at the Smithsonian Museum’s Insect Zoo. The arachnid, a red-backed jumping spider (Phidippus johnsoni) nicknamed Neffi after the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, spent over 100 days in orbit on the International Space …
"The loss of this special animal that inspired so many imaginations will be felt throughout the museum community"
For sure an interesting experiment, but really? Throughout the community? Are we to imagine the Generaldirektor of the Museum für Naturkunde sitting disconsolately at his desk with the email still open, coffee growing cold, moustachios slowly wilting? It's one common spider that was a subject of a relatively minor experiment and was going to die soon anyway (unless the mourning is really for it's not coming back stimulated by cosmic rays into an unstoppable city-ravaging monster?)
And not kidding about those moustachios:
http://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de/index.php
Britain needs to look to its boffinry laurels pronto - once that man levels up with the polka-dot bow tie section of C&A he'll be the unstoppable monster.
"...sitting disconsolately at his desk with the email still open, coffee growing cold, moustachios slowly wilting?"
Dude, that's fantastic. You need to post more. Hell, you need a column. That's some fine wordsmithing there, friend.
I got a thumbs-down for complimenting someone? That seems uncalled-for. Perhaps my saccharine praise was misconstrued as sarcasm; if so... well, it wasn't. Anyway. You know, my wife says she'll grow a mustache if I divorce her - wait, no, it's something else. She says she'll divorce me if I grow a mustache. That's got to be it.
As animals get smaller, they are working at a lower Reynolds Number. At very small sizes, inertia starts to become meaningless, and your movements are dominated by things like air viscosity. So a small animal won't notice gravity to anything like the extent that we do - it's unsurprising that there was no great change in its feeding behaviour...
Well, I'm guessing they didn't ask it if it felt like barfing, or put it on a tiny treadmill when they got back - and while I'm not an orni.. ichthini... inse... carniv... not a spider expert, I'm pretty sure that cardiovascular deconditioning isn't an issue.
Anyway, can spiders even barf?
I wonder if they kept track of the food intake of the two spiders and could determine if the longer lived one was able to gather more food.
On a related note, it looks from the video like the flies didn't cope quite as well as the spider did and to me that is actually more interesting. The butterfly in space video shows the butterfly very awkward but it really doesn't have the room to figure it out before crashing into something. Pity they don't have the room available for something to try a proper flight. Perhaps they could focus on the little flies next time and run a few generations to see if the flies can 'evolve' enough to get it right. I would think in space it would only take a wing beat or two for propulsion and then it's just directional control.
We of course in Australia, had squillions of the little sticky black bastards - covered in them.
Every time we got a hot northerly wind, it blew billions of them southwards into the city.
One lunch time in Australia, I sat in the playground and killed about 72 of them.... in half an hour.
Then the CSIRO had to introduce dung beetles from Egypt, that could handle the billions of tons of wet aussie cowshit that the flies bred in... and sort of rooned my plan to spend the rest of my life angrily squishing hundreds of millions of sticky black bush flies.....
So seeing the fruit flies buzzing around in microgravity - it's a funny thing.
Pity there was no vid of the spider making a cross cage jump onto one.
That would have been good to see.
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