Entomologist Loses Three-Hour Argument About Whether Spiders Are Bugs at Family Barbecue

Entomologist Dr. Priya Chen spent the better part of a Fourth of July barbecue in an increasingly desperate attempt to explain to her extended family that spiders are not, taxonomically speaking, bugs, insects, or even members of the class Insecta. The dispute began when Chen's uncle, Harold, slapped a copy of the New York Times on the table and declared, 'Says here they found a new species of bug in the Amazon,' pointing to a photograph of a whip spider. 'That's an amblypygid,' Chen said. 'It's an arachnid. It has eight legs. Insects have six. They're in entirely different classes within the phylum Arthropoda.' 'It's a bug,' Harold said. What followed was a three-hour pedagogical effort that witnesses describe as 'heroic and ultimately futile.' Chen produced a cladogram on her phone. She drew a Venn diagram on a paper plate. She retrieved a preserved wolf spider from her car — 'I always keep one for exactly this situation' — and counted its legs aloud. 'She had visual aids,' said Chen's cousin Darnell. 'She literally held up a spider and said, count the legs, and Uncle Harold said, I see eight bug legs.' The argument reached its nadir when Harold proposed a vote, which he won 11-1 on the grounds that 'if it makes you scream, it's a bug.' Chen has been invited to present a formal rebuttal at Thanksgiving. She has already prepared a 40-slide deck titled 'Arthropod Classification for People Who Are Wrong.'