"The Spirally Slanted Spidrid's Mad Dash For Safety!"

Last September I presented part of a painting showing the Mad Sickle, a species of spirally slanted spidrid ('slanties'). The comments quickly gave rise to two new ideas: the first was that the legs and body of slanties might hook up to form a nearly impregnable wall. I should probably do a painting of one. The second was that slanties might well move by cartwheeling. Imagine that as follows: a spidrid's body along with the legs sticking out in all directions forms a disk; now flip the disc onto its edge and roll it along; that's it.  Slanties might use this trick to escape very quickly down a hill.

As usual, life on earth manages to trump anything the speculative biologist can think of. To prove that, here is a short video showing a Namibian spider using exactly that same trick to escaper down a hill, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. There are also spiders that actually do a series of somersaults, head over tails, but that is another type of movement and also another story: here's a video).

Slanties have an additional trick up their sleeves: once flipped on their side, there is nothing to stop them from using the power of their legs to make this an active way of locomotion. Slanties need not be content with passively rolling downhill; they can get out of the way on horizontal terrain too. Actually, they could even roll uphill. I do not think that that would be more effective than normal walking (normal for slanties, that is!), but they could. 

Mind you, I am not saying I am the first to invent this way of locomotion for a fictive animal. I have written about Warren Fahy's 'disc ant' in the past, and there may be earlier manifestations as well.

   
So here is a quick animation of a slanted spidrid moving in this fashion. The legs flex and extend while the body rotates. I suppose it could also move on the other direction with nearly the same movement. We are looking at the dorsal side of the beast.

Here it is again, rolling in and out of view.

I doubt the animal would use this type of movement as part of its normal repertoire, because I do not think it would be able to see well, with the entire world circling around them like mad. In this respect, the movement is a bit like 'cernuation', a term to describe the movement of the 'squibbon' of The Future is Wild. To read about possible visual problems, find the posts here and here. The poor spidrid only sees the world as a blur when wheeling around in this way, and that is why it uses wheeling only as a last resort to escape from predation.