Natural History Wanderings

UC Davis reported

any spiders reach their maximum size about this time of year, having spent the summer eating, which helps explain their starring role in Halloween decorations. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have found one particular trapdoor spider, Aptostichus stephencolberti, which is about the size of a quarter, is big in another way: It has an outsized genome.

Given comedian Stephen Colbert’s pompous pundit persona in the former Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report,” it seems fitting that a spider named for him would have a genome roughly 50% larger than the human genome.

Read more at Scientists Sequence Genome of Spider Named for Stephen Colbert