It is only a few millimeters in size, performs a dance as part of a courtship ritual and has striking colored markings on its back that “look like a pharaoh’s headdress,” but when biologist Jurgen Otto first spotted the peacock spider species that he has named Maratus unicup, he did not immediately recognize how special it was.
“I didn’t think much of it because I’m partially color blind, but there was quite a reaction to photographs of it on the Internet, with people saying it’s beautiful,” Otto said.
Maratus unicup is one of two new peacock spider species that Otto and his colleague David Hill have named in a new paper published in the international spider journal Peckhamia
Otto discovered the spider near Lake Unicup in Western Australia last year.
He said the new species was notable for its courtship display, in which the male dances — swinging its abdomen from side to side — while the female watches from a close distance.
The second species they have named Maratus tortus and was discovered by environmental consultant and educator David Knowles in 1994 near Walpole in Western Australia.
Knowles and Otto have returned to the site several times and were finally able to capture specimens of the spider last year.
Knowles had originally nicknamed the species “hokey pokey” because of the male’s curious twisting dance.
“There’s no other peacock spider that has this kind of a display,” Otto said. “It looks almost like a Spanish bullfight, where the female is the bull and the male is the bullfighter.”
In the paper, Otto and Hill say there are now 70 species of peacock spiders, the majority of which have been named by them over the past seven years.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the