Profiles of Nature 19

wolf spider Lycosidae Eulalia with two-lined spittlebug Prosapia bicincta prey
The appeal is still pending, so we’re still going! This week we meet Eulalia, here in her scene from Baywatch performing mouth-to-mouth on her co-star, sure to keep the ratings high. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth and a set of hemostats in her duodenum, the malpractice settlement allowed Eulalia’s family to move away to Chicago, where she was eventually discovered, packed away with the cleaning supplies. Even later, she was discovered by a casting agent and got her big break in the Broadway production of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins when she played Forgettable Token Ingenue. From there, the parts and the fame just kept rolling in – mostly to other people, but hey, she enjoyed the spectacle of it anyway. She boasts of having an Entourage, the Blu-Ray version, and tries to work Versace into the conversation every chance she gets, only she thinks it’s a type of caviar; this has led to some pretty horrified looks from others at parties. She’s a fitness buff, but what else is new? Eulalia is still single, and admits that she’s looking for a man that’s not afraid to cry when he takes a hard hit to the nuts after wrecking his bike, which makes us wonder about past dates – and the future ones as well. Her favorite manufacturer of slip-joint pliers is Knipex, despite the public shaming this earns her.

Yup, next week. Be strong.

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I have to add this, and even worse, be serious for a moment here. I’d featured this image back in 2014 and credited it (and another) as a fishing spider, because they both were hanging out in a bucket of water, diving underneath the surface to escape attention, and capturing prey while skating atop. And just now, while preparing this post, I looked at the eyes and said, Wait a second. In the intervening seven years, I’d discovered the method of determining spider families by eye arrangements, and now knew these weren’t fishing spiders, but wolf spiders instead. That were acting like fishing spiders. This is not unknown to entomologists, but it was news to me, and something that I’d never seen before or since. It’s not like they were forced to use the water through that being the only available habitat; the spiders had an entire yard at their disposal, and like I said, this was only a bucket, not exactly a teeming metropolis of arthropoda. But hey, you do you, little spiders.