People who say all pedophiles should die have never met a paraphile and don’t realize how close to conversion therapy they are. Any mental health practitioner worth their salt knows that paraphilias shouldn’t be met with torches and pitchforks but with bare minimum sympathy and healthy outlets.
African Social Spiders: these spiders live in colonies containing up to 2,000 individuals, most of which are female, and they hunt, forage, maintain the web, and raise their offspring as a group, without any dominance hierarchy or caste system
Communal behavior is extremely rare among spiders. This species (Stegodyphus dumicola) is one of the few known examples of a true "social spider," living in communal nests where all of the spiders work together to hunt, forage, build webs, and care for their young.
Above: this photo shows an African social spider feeding some of the young spiderlings in her colony by regurgitating food into their mouths
African social spiders can be found in the arid regions of southwestern Africa, where their dense silk nests are often built in the branches of thorn trees and shrubs. They form colonies that can contain hundreds or even thousands of individuals; most of the spiders in these colonies are female (more than 85%) and they are often closely related to one another.
This species also has a female-biased primary sex ratio, with studies indicating that female embryos are developed in more than 80% of the eggs that the spiders produce.
Above: a group of African social spiders working together to subdue their prey, which will be taken back to the nest and shared with the rest of the colony
The entire colony works together to complete a variety of tasks. While none of the spiders are exclusively assigned to a single role/job, they may spend more time participating in certain tasks than others, depending on their physical size and condition. Some of them subdue and retrieve any prey that gets caught in the web, while others repair, maintain, or expand the web itself, engage in foraging, or tend to the colony's offspring, which are raised together as a group.
There is no evidence that any social hierarchy or caste system exists within these communities. There are no queens, and none of the roles are assigned at birth.
Above: close-up of Stegodyphus dumicola
African social spiders are particularly devoted when it comes to their maternal duties. They engage in extreme allomaternal care, which means that they share the responsibility of caring for the colony's offspring. Maternal care is provided by both mothers and non-mothers. They tend to one another's eggsacs, regurgitate food for the spiderlings, and even engage in matriphagy, which means that they eventually allow themselves to be eaten by the growing brood.
... some proportion of females do not reproduce – sometimes as much as 60% – but remain as helpers, contributing to foraging and brood care (allo-mothering). Both breeding females and virgin allo-mothers regurgitate food for colony offspring and eventually let the young consume their bodies. Even subadult females provide regurgitation feeding to colony offspring.
Young that are raised with both mothers and allo-mothers show higher survival and growth than young raised by their mothers alone, suggesting a clear fitness benefit of cooperative breeding.
This species can be found in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Lesotho, and Eswatini.
it seems that a lot of times people telling someone to “get therapy” envision the ideal outcome of this to be essentially like lobotomizing the person in question
the idea that predators and abusers are an ontological category of person, rather than everyone having the capacity to be predatory and abusive, leads to people having no regard for boundaries because they think that predation only comes from evil people ™
I recently found a Spinarak in my yard, missing a leg. Other than that he seems to be fine, and he’s taken quite a liking to me. I want to keep him around as my partner, but I don’t know much about keeping a special needs Pokemon. I’ve read up a lot on bug type care, but would you recommend surrendering him to a shelter or just letting him be wild instead?
the nice thing about having so many legs is that losing one of them isn’t usually the end of the world! spinarak are quite capable of thriving while missing a leg or two. as long as you feel confident in caring for a spinarak in general, you shouldn’t really need to do anything different.
if you do decide to take him in, make sure to have your vet assess how old he is. if he’s still young and has some molts to go, he might even regrow the leg back! the same is true if you decide to evolve him. otherwise, he’ll do just fine as a pentapod.
Posted by chrochro
