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Early Arthropods

|< < Prev #3199 (January 26, 2026)

Title text: 'Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own busines and don't do anything weird.' --The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects

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Explanation

This comic pokes fun at spiders, which have a very unusual way of catching prey.

Note that evolution in real life does not work the way the comic implies, as creatures cannot decide which direction in which to evolve.^{[citation needed]}

Spiders are a recurring theme on xkcd.

The hovertext mentions the eusocial insects, another group of arthropods. They are notable for not "minding their own business", as their ancestor arthropod apparently expects.

Eusociality has evolved multiple times in the Hymenoptera alone, as well as in termites. There is no arthropod species that is the ancestor to all the eusocial arthropods and no others.

Transcript

[Wide panel with three small arthropods standing on the ocean floor. Two of the creatures are facing the leftmost one. Small bubbles and particles float around them.]

Arthropod 1: Now that we're multicellular, what are your plans?

Arthropod 1: I'm gonna evolve little legs and swim around with them!

Arthropod 2: I'm gonna evolve sharp pincers and use them to crunch stuff!

Arthropod 3: I'm gonna evolve glands to make string from my butt and use it to construct elaborate geometric nets hundreds of times my size to catch other animals.

[Beat panel narrowed in on the arthropods.]

[Same scene:]

Arthropod 1: Dude.

Arthropod 2: Can you please just be normal about this?

Arthropod 3: What??!

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