Barrier Trapper

iptámenos toíchos( "Flying Wall" )

  Physical Biometrics:

Leg Span ( Length ):

up to 14 inches / 35 cm

Weight / Mass: 

300-400 grams

Distribution and Environment:

Wallers live deep in the midst of the competitive rainforests along the island chains. Juveniles are arboreal, and use silk-web ballooning to travel and disperse, making this group of animals very widespread and diverse. Adults move along the forest floor, and often remain motionless in crevasses or burrows.

Description:

Barrier Trapper's most distinct appearance is the change in color. It is sporadically uneven shades of grey, with bits of dark mottled green across its dorsal region, with its round abdomen resembling that of a mossy pebble. This is presumably to blend in alongside normally stationary objects, due to the prevalence of visual based predators arriving following the Exaplosi Expansion.

Its juvenile form is light enough where it can create a parachute for ballooning, a behavior convergently aligning the most common dispersing behavior of spiders on Old Earth. Young barrier trappers are arboreal, and commonly exploit the branches for use of their webs in ensnaring prey. As they mature, they transition on to the ground, where they create a sort of "wall", across an area that is traversed by other animals. They will then lie in wait at either ends, either the animal runs into the wall, or attempts to circumvent it by going around the wall, which the spider will opportunistically catch. In more sophisticated species, two spiders can collaborate at either end of the wall, allowing them to account for any scenario for which the prey item attempts to go around the wall. They themselves possess elongated forelimbs with the ability to carry a "net", to manually ensnare trickier prey.

Evolution / Anatomy:

They arise from a population of Goliath Birdeaters that found increasingly higher success by lining their burrows with more and more silk for protection, until it became obligate, as just like the spiders on Old Earth, they found great success in laying web based traps. Their lifestages also is a pattern of a series of similar strategies employed by other life on Hoxia, by having different stages of life live in varying environments. Their strategy of manually using nets to ensnare is also convergently similar to that of the Net Casting Spiders ( Deinopidae ) of Old Earth. Their venom is moderately lethal.

Known Descendants: 

( N / A, coming soon )