Nopeland Discovery: the Blog

" What they want, you see, is not the truth; it's coherence. A miscarriage of justice is always a masterpiece of coherence." Daniel Pennac, Monsieur Malaussène (1995) *   Among the common spiders in Europe, giant house spiders (genus Eratigena , particularly species of the Eratigena atrica group) certainly are the most dreaded by arachnophobes. Huge, long-legged and dazzlingly fast, male giant house spiders often cause quite a commotion when they bolt across rooms at dusk in summer and fall, as they wander through homes in search of a mate. However, the fear and disgust they tend to induce in many people is purely based on their dark, leggy and hairy appearance, and their large size; pretty much everyone knows these impressive spiders are quite harmless. Even the most depraved tabloids, despite their tendency to make stories out of the silliest rumours , do not dare to claim they are dangerous. Their bites are not, and have never been, a cause for concern. Reaching up to ...

  Warning: this article shows some images of medically significant animals near human hands. These animals were not being handled, and this is not something I encourage or condone. Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean sea, between the coasts of France and Italy. Ask any of its inhabitants, and they'll tell you it's the most beautiful place on Earth. Sure, islanders all over the world will often claim the same about their island, but it's hard to deny that Corsica is absolutely gorgeous: majestic mountains plunging into the azure sea, heavenly beaches and coves, sand dunes covered in wild flowers, snow-capped peaks shining under the blue sky, their slopes dotted with picturesque little villages...  It is also a place blessed with an extreme scarcity of dangerous land animals. It doesn't have any venomous snakes or medically significant scorpions. Mosquito-borne yellow fever and malaria used to take their toll on Corsicans unlucky enough to work and live in swampy ...

Tarantula. A famous word for a famous animal. Everyone knows what a tarantula is: it's a massive, impressive, hairy spider.  What typically comes to mind when one thinks "tarantula" is a large Theraphosid spider, such as this  Lasiodora parahybana Nowadays, the spiders colloquially known as "tarantulas" are species in the family Theraphosidae, which is the most diverse (with over 1100 described species ) and the most famous family of the infra-order Mygalomorphae . The smallest Theraphosidae species are about 10 mm long, which is not small by spider standards, and most of them are large to very large. The largest representatives of this family, species in the genus Theraphosa , are the largest and heaviest spiders on Earth, which can reach up to 12 cm in body length and 170g in body mass. Besides their often impressive size, many Theraphosidae sport beautiful colours and patterns, and many New World taxa, such as species in the genera Tliltocatl , Brachypelma , ...