This has this sort of vibe:
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My concern is that this is another:
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I blame the AKC.
We did basset hounds. We can make basset spiders.
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" Deformed and Sex combs reduced are necessary for leg fate specification in Phalangium opilio"
I always love the names that genetics ends up producing. Honestly, If I read that Deformed was opening for Sex Combs Reduced near me I’d definitely buy tickets.
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DLLs are harmless. Boy Scout summer camping in upstate NY: Pretty much every morning we’d wake up to one or more of those guys adhering to the inside of our tent walls. Strangely enough, as much as most bugs freak me out, the DLLs never did. It would have been a different story, though, if I woke up to one on (or in!!) my sleeping bag. As far as Usain Bolt Daddy Short Legs getting out into the wild, camping is no longer on my travel menu.
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Here, in the Olde Worlde, we call Crane Flies, “Daddy Long Legs”. They freak me out as they are such a gangly, bumbling mess.
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Now those freak me out!
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Huh, It didn’t really answer anything there. Still wants to turn people into Dinosaurs. I can get behind that vibe.
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Don’t Boomers naturally turn in to dinosaurs? 
(I’m on the cusp of Boomer and Gen X).
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A friend at work once showed me a photo he had taken at a Rick Wakeman concert. On stage flanking the band were a couple of giant T-Rex inflatables. He pointed those out… chuckling. Me: “Those weren’t the only dinosaurs up there…” He did not look happy.
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At least they didn’t do turtles.
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Similar experience, except instead of DLLs they were finger-sized grasshoppers with big thorns* on the end (*ovipositors, I guess).
“Good morning!”
Yikes!
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For what it’s worth, the short leg trait produced in this study is not hereditary, because it is produced by RNA interference - basically, an injection into an embryo that tricks an intra-cellular immune pathway into treating the spider’s own genes as though they come from a virus and need to be suppressed. Also, since the short legs are not actually proper walking legs but pedipalps, it’s not clear that they could walk at all. Again, since the study was not about producing short-legged spiders, none of them probably even got to reach adulthood, as the studied specimens were all embryos or hatchlings.
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What is that, a musical for ants?
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Oh this showed up as a creepy-film-name reference in something recently and I am going to go mad trying to remember it now. Thanks
