For the record, what we have here is your basic wolf spider. I know this because the image Forrest linked to me of this little cutie-pie was linked to a german Wikipedia article. I don’t read German but Google Translate was able to twist it into something that was close enough to English for me to get the title down. Funny enough, they are known for having excellent vision which makes sense given those big, puppy-dog eyes. They are venomous but mostly harmless to humans, which is good considering we are genetically programmed to snuggle anything that looks like that.
Cuteness itself is something that has always bothered me. That the human brain is rigged to behave with uncontrollable diversion of resources to a certain subset of facial layouts seems an obvious weakness to exploit. Our own kind does this with ritual efficiency with the design of children’s toys, but imagine a conquering extraterrestrial species had done the same marketing research. Their invasion might consist of a billion combustible kittens.
Beware the cute.
Ja.