#Spiders

tinsnip
Anonymous asked:
aaaaaaa im so glad to hear that tarantulas can swim!!! For context I love both tarantulas and animal crossing so the first time I saw one fall in water I was just like "Noooooooooo baby :((((("
bunjywunjy answered:

it’s not really swimming so much as it is ‘using the hairs on its legs to walk on the surface of the water by abusing surface tension physics’ but you know what, close enough.


bunjywunjy

all I’m saying here is that if you encounter one in a swimming hole it would technically be more accurate to scream ‘help, this tarantula is water skiing towards me really slowly!’ than ‘help, this tarantula is swimming right at me!’ but honestly who’s going to split hairs at that point

spiderstarantulas
airyairyaucontraire
wumblr:
“ sixth-light:
“ prospitianescapee:
“ prospitianescapee:
“ wumblr:
“so that’s what happened to spiders georg
”
“More than 20 scientists — co-authors, peers and other interested observers in the field — mobilized to pore through the data in...
prospitianescapee

More than 20 scientists — co-authors, peers and other interested observers in the field — mobilized to pore through the data in almost 150 papers on which Pruitt is a co-author, looking for evidence of manipulated or fabricated numbers. They found similar signs of copy-and-paste duplications. In at least one instance, researchers identified formulae inserted into a published excel file, designed to add or subtract from a pasted value and create new data points.

HAHAHAHA

prospitianescapee

(I think it’s this one…? The spider scientists’ collaborative bullshit-tracking sheet also lists two paywalled papers - this one and this one - whose “raw data” was provided via Excel files which generated some of their own contents.)

sixth-light

seriously though, this isn’t funny; this was originally discovered by a woman who had reached out to this man to form a collaboration shortly after finishing her PhD, and then discovered years later that his part of the collaboration had involved…just…making up the data so it looked like it proved her hypothesis. this is gut-wrenching for the scientists involved. modern science is a team effort and you have to rely on your collaborators being honest. if they aren’t, you can (and people apparently have) waste years of work. additionally, it casts the shadow of doubt on everybody who worked with him. they’ll have to prove they didn’t know about the fraud and that their other work is sound. people are going to have to spend ages combing through all the data, when they could be doing new work. it’s a complete nightmare. 

plus, if he was wholesale faking data, then you have to wonder what happened to any students or lab workers who noticed. did he fast-talk them? force them out? make them complicit? falsify their data and let them graduate using it? it’s going to be ugly whichever way. 

wumblr

oh absolutely! the worst implication being that (as sabine hossenfelder has been saying for years) the academic “citation mill” implicitly encourages this, so one must wonder who else has been trying to pull this kind of shit

sciencespiderssneaky shit
airyairyaucontraire
heartachedreamboy

why do they always show cranberries in thos big pits n its implied its wet and possibly swimmable. do cranberries really grow like that. wh

thetaobella

You’ve never heard of The Bog?

heartachedreamboy

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EACH ADDITION TO THIS POST MAKES MY BLOOD RUN COLD

punkrorschach

image

This is a cranberry bog (unflooded) it’s how cranberries grow. Once they’re ripe, the blog is flooded and the cranberries harvested.

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Basically by using big floaty things to round them all up and then scooping them out of the water.

heartachedreamboy

thank u. i hate it a little less but the horrible little man in my head is still screaming “BOG BODY BOG BODY BOG BODY”, but i appreciate the education,

bomberqueen17

oh here is a fun lil perspective on cranberry harvesting i never heard about anywhere else. the guy who owns the restaurant right down the road from the farm, who fries our chickens sometimes, is from Boston, with the strongest Boston accent ever, and in a former life before he started slinging reasonably priced barbeque and occasional organic chicken, he was a cranberry farmer.

His farm was on the leading edge of kinda using organic/sustainable pest control methods, and one of the things that they did to keep insect damage down was that they encouraged wolf spiders to live in the cranberry field, to eat the bugs. 

This was all fine and good until they flooded the bog. Now, you don’t just like flood the bog and then go around it in a boat or whatever. No, you use hip waders to get in there and put the big floaty things where they go and get all the berries and such.

Well when you’re in the bog in hip waders, that makes you the tallest thing. Wolf spiders can swim a bit, but they don’t like it, so they’re, quite understandably, looking to climb out of the water onto a tall thing.

So yeah the first interview question he always asked potential cranberry bog harvester hires was “are you cool with spiders?”

“You’d be amazed,” he said to us, shaking his head a little, “how many guys would just straight lie. Like, you think I’m asking you that question to be cute? Nah man you’re gonna have like a hundred wolf spiders trying to climb your eyebrows, you gotta be chill, those wolf spiders are fellow employees. You really gotta be chill with spiders if you’re gonna work a cranberry harvest.”

nerdgul

Gonna go ahead and mark that om the list of Jobs To NEVER Apply For

spiderscranberries