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Old 11-23-2007, 09:15 AM   #5 (permalink)
Martian
Young Crumudgeon
 
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Location: Canada
Quote:
Originally Posted by skier
I don't see why it isn't an arachnid- or even a straight out spider.

Having two body segments, 8 limbs, it's eye grouping all suggest spider.

To me, it looks like a hunting/jumping spider with specialized forelimbs, these perhaps for a certain type of prey.
It's not an arachnid because there aren't enough limbs.

Arachnids (confusingly enough) are characterized by having twelve limbs; eight for locomotion, two (known as the pedipalps) that that are typically specialized for defence or hunting and two more (known as chelicerae) specialized for feeding. This thing has a pair of pedipalps and I can almost make out what appear to be chelicerae, but it only has six locomotive legs. Hexapods, in contrast, are so named because (excluding wings) they only have six appendages, which means it's not one of them either.

It's possible that this is actually a subspecies of spider that's lost a pair of legs due to injury or misadventure. Otherwise, I just don't know.

EDIT - after spending more time than I care to admit trying to peg this, I'm forced to conclude that the most probable explanation is that this is, in fact, a jumping spider. The morphology doesn't seem quite right here, but the images are more than a little blurry; given that it's unlikely that Hal stumbled across an entirely new phylum of arthropod hiding out in Malaysia, the fault is most likely mine. The most likely explanation, then, is that what I initially assumed to be heavily modified pedipalps are instead heavily modified locomotors; thus, what I thought to be the chelicerae would actually be the pedipalps and I must be missing the chelicerae.

So, yeah. We'll go with jumping spider, probably an ant mimic, given that that was the initial identification.

For the record, your beetle is most likely a subspecies of scarab and the moth... well, there's literally thousands of different lepidopterae out there, but it's a fun little bird mimic.
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Last edited by Martian; 11-23-2007 at 09:59 AM..
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