Post by Colton the fish squeezer🐟🪴📚🏕️🐝 / Redsky

Colton the fish squeezer🐟🪴📚🏕️🐝 • Feed

I found a cat spider under the bay window and fed it a grasshopper. This thing is huge! What is inside a spider's abdomen, anyway? Is it just intestines? Do bugs even HAVE intestines? Or is it like...developing eggs? Or just sloshing soup? I'm fascinated and also slightly grossed out by it. #Invert

A hairy spider with an enormous abdomen and striped legs drinks hemolymph tea from a silk-encased grasshopper.

aug 31, 2025, 2:56 pm • 15 0

Replies

Whoa! Turns out it's mostly seaweed but there's also a fork and a cluster of grapes and it looks like a fungus is invading its butt. Real story - I didn't know that the oviduct was away from the poop/spinneret end, spiders are so much weirder than I thought.

A Wikipedia diagram of a spider's abdomen. It shows a yellow intestinal structure in the middle that is joined by hundreds of branching digestive tubules which I was calling seaweed and exits at the anus in the rear of the abdomen. There is also an ovary that looks like a cluster of purple Concord grapes, which exits toward the front of the bottom of the abdomen. Right in front of the oviduct is the book lung, which looks like a fork with too many tines. A large red, chambered heart that is shaped like a really fat spider leg arcs over the top of the other internal structures. The silk glands look like panicles of grass growing from three cone shaped spinnerets just in front of the anus. There is also a little tree-shaped structure called a malpighian tubule running parallel to the lower intestine that is a complete mystery to me.

aug 31, 2025, 3:05 pm • 8 0 • view

A other reason to keep your cats indoors!

aug 31, 2025, 2:59 pm • 1 0 • view

Eww, imagining a cat crunching through this thing disgusts me so much.

aug 31, 2025, 3:07 pm • 0 0 • view

I thought it would crunch through the cat

aug 31, 2025, 3:14 pm • 1 0 • view