Dogs and Cats, Living Together

If the discovery several weeks ago of the vast spiderweb in Texas had not already suggested to you that we are living in the end-times, consider that entomologists now think that twelve different families of spiders — “families” in the taxonomic sense, not the “household” sense — cooperated to construct the giant web. Bill Poser at Language Log compared this to a cooperative effort among humans and eleven other primate species, such as Lar Gibbons

But it gets even spookier than that, since in a follow-up post he notes that the spiders’ arthropod species are a great deal more diverse than are mammalian species — so a fairer metaphor might enlist humans cooperating with marsupials. So now, imagine a complex engineering endeavor in which humans, gibbons, chimpanzees, gorillas, lemurs, baboons, kangaroos, wombats, opossums, Tasmanian devils, bandicoots, and koalas participate together (too bad, for this exercise alone the Thylacosmilus became extinct!).

That funny taste at the back of your throat may be adrenaline.

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