Word: spidered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...contrast to the astronauts, other passengers aboard Skylab did not do so well on their return to earth. The tiny minnows that were born aboard the space station died after their arrival in Houston; Arabella, the surviving spider who had quickly mastered the art of weaving her web in zero-G, was found dead in her vial by NASA doctors...
Solar Cycle. Other earthlings aboard Skylab did not fare as well. The spider Arabella, which became famous by demonstrating that it could spin a web in zero G, survived the return to earth. But its arachnid companion Anita died before the end of the mission, apparently of starvation; Anita stubbornly refused to eat the morsels of filet mignon that were offered. Other casualties were the two minnows that had been carried aboard Skylab. However, their offspring - the first earth creatures to be born in space (except, perhaps, for some offspring of stowaway bacteria on earlier nights) - made it safely...
Almost all of the 579 animals that live on the Durrell preserve are in danger of extinction and are treated accordingly. A recently arrived spider monkey that refused to eat ("Apes are the hypochondriacs of the animal world") was finally coaxed into feasting on smoked cod roe. A sulking capybara, the world's largest rodent, was found to be partial to spaghetti. "An animal likes variety just as we do," says Durrell, a skilled cook. "If you give it a tomato day after day, it goes mad. It may want a bloody watermelon for a change...
...extinct dodo as SAFE'S emblem, and sports a button reading "Dodo Power," in the hope of dramatizing the urgency of the situation: the flightless bird was extinct only 186 years after Europeans landed on its home island of Mauritius. "The dodo was part of a delicate spider web that connects us all," says Durrell. "Every time you muck about with that web, it sends tremors all the way through...
...sloppy manufacturing or lax quality control resulting from NASA's recent economies. Chief Flight Controller Eugene Kranz agreed, but then added: "We'll never know until we get the darn things down and look at them." There was one performance that no one could fault: a spider named Arabella, on board Skylab for a biological experiment, accommodated to space flight within only a day or two, learning to spin her complex geometric web in zero-G after only a few false starts. Said Garriott with a touch of envy: "She is a very fast learner indeed...