What, dear readers, is this?
The first commentator to guess the species of this animal will win ten Myrmecos points.
The cumulative points winner for the month of January will take home their choice of 1) any 8×10-sized print from my photo galleries, or 2) a guest post here on Myrmecos.
Coccinella magnifica?
Latrodectus hasselti? Australian redback spider, which is quite venomous and might be of use for a thrilller/horror writer such as Stephen King?
Going to go simple on this one:
Coleoptera beetle.
Going with the non-native: Harmonia axyridis
It looks like an out of focus image and/or 100% crop with not much to go on to me.
I recognize the mottled red of a widow spider–having lived in a Tucson house with about a dozen on my porch–but since you have been in Australia it must be the Redback spider, Latrodectus hasselti.
I suppose I might as well throw out L. katipo as a possibility…along with L. geometricus (its a little orange).
Hooray Latrodectus.
It looks a lot like the giant Martian amoeba that engulfed the humans’ spaceship in The Angry Red Planet. Specifically, the view when they were looking out of the spaceship’s porthole at the amoeba’s insides.
“Do not return to Mars!”
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