China’s People’s Daily has released footage of a small green spider with a human-like face painted across its rear, with the ‘face’ complete with eyes, a nose, a smiling mouth, eyebrows, and even what looks like a receding hairline.
The video received tens of thousands of hits on Twitter, and spreading quickly to other platforms; it was filmed by a woman named Li at her home in Yuangjiang, a city in China’s Hunan province.
The footage has intrigued users, one of whom compared the face to that in Norwegian expressionist artist Edvard Munch’s famous painting ‘The Scream’, with other warning that it could be Spiderman’s arch nemesis Venom, or joking that this was a case for the FBI’s Alien Department.
One user asked if the footage indicated that spiders were “mutating.” “It’s like something sneaked out of Area 51,” another wrote.
One helpful user appeared to solve the mystery, saying the spider looked like a “harmless thomisid” known as ebrechtella tricuspidata, a species of crab spiders living across wide swathes of Asia, Russia, the Caucasus, Turkey and Europe, and typically inhabiting meadows and the edges of forests in search of prey.
A few Spider-Man nerds got sidetracked, however, starting a debate about whether it was appropriate to label the arachnid a true spider man.