Spider People Art

I wish. I want a giant jumping spider pet/roommate who I can cuddle and feed squirrels and birds.

finally a thread for me
I fucking LOVE spiders dudes, fav animal

C-can I join?

if your playing dnd, don't forget the ettercap

I'd say it'd be pretty damn difficult to test for intelligence in any insect, and spiders naturally live such short lives that maintaining a breeding population would require an enormous amount of micromanagement.

this thought has crossed my mind so many times and I'm practically an expert on spiders so let me tell you how this can and can't work

...

...

firstly lets talk about species, since the care and lifespan will depend on that. Spiders are generally at the low end of the intelligence scale, and by that I mean they do not have memory or the capability to learn, they do not have emotions as we know them and are basically robots, drones who serve a purpose and do not deviate from their prepackaged instructions. HOWEVER there is one group that does, the 'portia' genus. the spiders are the most intelligent arthropod out there, they have memory, the capacity to learn and adapt their hunting techniques and hunt just like cats, unlike most spiders they also show the ability to be relatively social without ripping each others throats out, to alter a spiders brain chemistry to achieve any amount of intelligence would usually be unreasonable and take way longer than any of us will be alive but this genus has all the groundwork laid out for us already. I won't go into all the details of their intelligence here so you should look it up yourself. the point is portia spiders are our best bet but now we have to figure out how to care for them, this is the tricky part...

...

To put some perspective into how intelligent portia spiders are, they have been known in the wild to study and record the series of vibrations on another spider's web made by trapped insects, potential mates, or falling debris. The portia spider will then mimic the vibrations to attract the web's resident spider and lead it into an ambush. Portia spiders prey on other spiders, you see.

Post

Moar

Spiders

>Ah, welcome! You are free to enjoy my hospitality however long you wish. Allow me to show you into the parlor.

Thank you for your accumulated knowledge, user

NOW!

Go on, sounds interesting

probably should've updated the thread

spiders of the portia genus are notoriously hard to care for, and by that I mean if your not a scientist specializing in arachnid intelligence, you probably have never owned a single one. we have the simplest problem being that they are very small jumping spiders which means you have to be careful with them escaping but that probably won't stop you. The first REAL problem is that these spiders are intelligent for a reason, they hunt exclusively other spiders, often many times their size. these guys employ the multiple advanced and complicated hunting techniques to outsmart are variety of differing spider species meaning that not only do you need a constant supply of other often larger spiders to feed your portia, these feeder spiders must also be fed and cared for so that they can spin their webs, become comfortable and open themselves up to attack from the portia. you will have to then constantly transfer spiders into the portia's habitat without disturbing them and then hope nothing goes wrong and the spider you're trying to feed doesn't get eaten itself.
>pic related
a portia spider hunting a (relatively small) cross spider though the prey is often much larger than this.

>evening, m'lud. Yer wanna buy a net? 's guaranteed to ground boars fer hours.

Thats cool and all but can you explain why all pictures of portia spiders look like cheap cgi or a bad photoshop??

since these spiders hunt this way they need relatively large enclosures despite their tiny size, meaning that the enclosure for just one takes up a frankly ridiculous amount of space. and this is all assuming you can get one, they are only found in certain places (generally Australasia) and are usually illegal to export, and if not noone is exporting them anyway because they don't make good pets, even if you do live in the area few people are selling them and they are very difficult to find in the wild.

they're just weird looking. especially portia-frimbiata which is the species in the pic you posted

Steal the Weavers from Perdido Street Station. They're huge, and able to use more than our 3 dimensions to get around. They tend to keep up a stream-of-conciousness ramble, and do incomprehensible things. One had a temporary obsession with scissors, and the only way to get it to talk to you was by giving it a pair of scissors which it would stick to a wall.

At one point it gathered up the protagonists and an enemy militia and teleported them to the sewer. When they arrived, they realised it had cut off one of each of their ears. The militiaman had turned to glass. The spider then sat down and materialised a chess set and tried to play chess with the frozen militiaman.

I love how fucking weird they are.

spiders are fags.

My buddy for five minutes while taking lunch, fighting a wildfire in Arizona. I haven't been able to do shit, but if you crop the picture to have only the spider i think itd be awesome.

I named him Cutie Patooty.

...

I mean it's not really a spider....but enjoy anyway

...

...

now lets assume you have found a way to pull this off, multiple times over, because you will need a large sample for this to amount to anything, you now need a way to test their intelligence before you breed them, but how? there main motivator is food so you could try using other spiders as bait but these bit spiders will not all spin their webs the same so you each hunt will be very different. another option is to design a very simple puzzle or maze halfway through the tank with your spider on one side and the sacrificial lamb on the other, but then you have to make multiple tiny, tiny puzzle on a ridiculously small scale and hope that they aren't to complicated. the third option is too have the spiders fast and have multiple portia up against each other and let them resort to cannibalism but you are going to lose a lot of valuable specimens that way.

...

Hnnnng...

...

...

or this one.

...

>Spider art.

So, is a spider web a sculpture, or the recording of a dance performance?

lastly (although there are more things to consider but this is the abridged version)
>breeding
ya know the thing you asked about in the first place. although breeding spiders is difficult I see no reaqson why the portia genus would be anymore difficult to breed than any other samll spider (infact they are remarkably civil as far as spiders go) and the chance of them eating eachother is actually reduced so thats not the difficult part. the difficult part is once the spiders hatch there will be hundreds of them that you will have to seperate and care for individually, you will have to sacrifice (or atleast set free if their native to the area) most of them and also feed them other smaller spiders as they are only babies. some spiders can live up to 20 years but sadly these little guys will only live for a year and a half so breeding them based on their longevity may be a better idea. I think that covers the basics

I really like spiders, any questions?

...

...

...

>Huge spiders with signs of sentience
do normal sized spider on small things showing signs of sentience count?

...

Come my eight legged companion! We shall clear those filthy heathens from our lands!

...

Not from me, but thanks for the info. I'm also interested in spiders.

>you seem shaken friend, would you like a drink

>tfw every nightmare I have features spiders

Only good spider is a dead spider

It's a book

You strum the web to read the story

thanks for the valuable input, never heard that one before. i have socialphobia you don't see me wishing death on all humans, also

unpopular opinion, if you want a cute spider your better off going for a velvet spider rather than a jumper

just in case anyone is trying to be scientifically accurate (for whatever reason) here's some examples of how large creatures with exoskeletons have gotten.
>athropleura
latgest terrestrial invertebrate to ever live

>Meganisoptera
largest flying arthropod to ever exist

>eurypterid
largest arthropod to ever exist period (was aquatic)

>coconut crab
largest terrestrial invertebrate and arthropod to alive to day

>Spider people

>japanese spider crab
largest arthropod alive by leg span (aquatic)

>i have socialphobia you don't see me wishing death on all humans
That's probably because you don't hate humans nearly as much as I hate spiders

Fuck this part of the game. Fucking hostile spider-people everywhere with unaviodable, uncurable poison spit, fucking T'urthrax Matas from diffrent times all around and the labirinth/guessing game of finding the right one... several times.

>goliath birdeater (therphoas blondi)
largest spider alive by weight

oh honey, you have no fucking idea do you?

Hey there Archael!

Could we take the easier, if longer, path of engineering an intelligent spider?

holy shit archael is adorable. just a senile old man who likes knitting scarves for his adopted grandson

that is probably the only reasonable way to accomplish it. We will have the tech to do so before anyone could breed any significant amount of intelligence into a spider.

You can find the answer to that question written in fire in letters thirty feet high on the far side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet of Preliumtarn, which orbits the star Zarss, which is located in the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine. The long path to the message is lined with souvenir stands at spaced-out intervals.

And it says Raise Ye Not Up What Ye Cannot Put Down

God that is so fucking cool.

Man, these are some great spiders. Thanks, guys!

On the subject you might enjoy the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's a sci-fi one about humanity f-ing itself and intelligent spiders.

Kinda ended in a metaphorical wet fart in my opinion though

>Arizona

I heard that fire was pretty nuts user, be safe out there, at least spiderbro is looking out for you. I have some friends working down there so I've been watching it on the news.

...

Is that supposed to be some kimd of animated sex toy???

...

...

...

...

...

...

Portia spiders have a lot of optically active nanostructures on their exteriors, which leads to them often not appearing to match up with the lighting conditions of everything around them, especially in these close up, high detail shots.

...

...

...

...

My nigga

Sizing them up would remove one of their biggest and most interesting flaws: their need to freeze and calculate every thought due to their small bodies for complex brain. Also most jumping spiders would be a bit of the same considering they have to calculate every jump, an impressive feat for such tiny, non-mammal brains.

removing that flaw is the whole point of the operation, increasing their size allowing for exponentially increased intelligence as they reach tarantula sizes as their brains clearly are better optimized than most.

If you happen to come back, spideranon.
Within the realm of fiction, would adding lung-like organs to spiders help them grow to larger sizes?
How would they look if they became REALLY big? Considering the size limitations of the current "design"