tarantulas can live for well over a decade, and female tarantulas can expect to breed multiple times before they finally kick it! and since there’s always the expectation of there going to be a new clutch of eggs in the nest every year, there’s no benefit in getting rid of the frogs that will keep those eggs safe.
a female columbian lesserblack tarantula will treasure and protect her frogs until the day she dies, and then those frogs will go into the care of whichever of her daughters inherits her burrow! it’s an eternal cycle. a cycle of frog.
the scorpion came upon the frog on the riverbank.
“friend frog,” said the scorpion, waving its little pincer things in an emotive fashion, “would you carry me across? the river is wide, and I cannot swim.”
the frog was a kindly fellow, and hesitated, thinking it over.
now, this story could have progressed as it normally does, into a very sad and rather ham-fisted metaphor for the nature of the human experience, but luckily for both the frog and the reader (though not for the scorpion), our story is interrupted rather abruptly here by the sudden appearance of a ginormous fucking spider popping out of the bushes and making short work of the scorpion.
“Ribbort,” said the giant fuckoff tarantula, delicately wiping some scorpion off her huge terrifying spider fangs, “there you are! I was worried. you know better than to wander off into an allegory like this. come home, the children miss you.”
the frog, whose name was Ribbort, shrugged his damp little shoulders. indeed, some metaphors just can’t be accurately applied to the natural world, due to the enormously complex and often unexpected web of relationships between living creatures in any given ecosystem, and that is the way of things.
mc1303 