{"id":11188,"date":"2018-10-18T11:28:27","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T18:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=11188"},"modified":"2018-10-18T11:28:27","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T18:28:27","slug":"on-the-eating-of-birds-by-spiders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/18\/on-the-eating-of-birds-by-spiders\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Eating of Birds by Spiders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia strikes again. Or rather, Wikipedia strikes out again.<\/p>\n

We are informed (or were informed — I trust that the article will be corrected anon) that<\/p>\n

Linnaeus’s name\u00a0avicularia<\/i>\u00a0is derived from the Latin\u00a0avicula<\/i>, meaning “little bird,” and refers to a 1705 illustration by\u00a0Maria Sibylla Merian, showing a tarantula feeding on a bird.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s worse, though, is that this bit of garble was obviously the direct source for a recent blog entry<\/a> that credulously repeats the same naive misapprehension.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s quite true that Merian<\/a> shows a spider eating a bird, and that the pioneering entomologist identifies that bird as a “Colibritgen,” a hummingbird. There is no indication in her text, however, that the striking plate “illustrates a real event<\/a> that she witnessed in Suriname.” And Linnaeus’s inspiration for the name\u00a0avicularia\u00a0<\/em>in fact antedates Merian’s work by some decades.<\/p>\n

A look at the original description of Linnaeus’s\u00a0Aranea avicularia<\/em><\/a> — rather than at Wikipedia — reveals that Merian’s work<\/a>\u00a0was simply one of the several illustrated natural history sources the Archiater consulted. (You can click on the pictures.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And one of those sources, Adam Olearius’s 1674 catalogue<\/a> of Duke Frederick III’s\u00a0Kunstkammer\u00a0<\/em>Gottorf Castle in Schlewsig-Holstein, labels its big hairy spider\u00a0Aranea avicularia<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This was twenty-five years before Merian undertook her groundbreaking expedition to the Guyanas, and more than three decades before she published the greatest of all early modern entomologies.<\/p>\n

All well and good — but what about the behavior behind the spider’s grimly humorous epithet\u00a0avicularia, <\/em>“the birdkeeper”?<\/p>\n

The existential battle between hummingbirds and spiders is a commonplace in nearly all of the early European literature about the little birds, from the sixteenth century on. No one before or since has depicted it as dramatically as Sybilla Merian, but to suggest that she discovered the phenomenon is wrong — especially given the modest parenthetical comment she inserts into her discussion of the hummingbird:<\/p>\n

zoo als men my gezegt heeft,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“as they have told me.”<\/p>\n

Aren’t her real accomplishments enough without adding fictional deeds to them?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia strikes again. Or rather, Wikipedia strikes out again. We are informed (or were informed — I trust that the article will be corrected anon) that Linnaeus’s name\u00a0avicularia\u00a0is derived from the Latin\u00a0avicula, meaning “little bird,” and refers to a 1705 illustration by\u00a0Maria Sibylla Merian, showing a tarantula feeding on a bird. What’s worse, though, is … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “On the Eating of Birds by Spiders”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,27,1,7],"tags":[691,690,692],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11188"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11208,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188\/revisions\/11208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}