Arthropods in culture Arthropods in culture Culture consists of the social behaviour and norms in human societies transmitted through social learning. Arthropods play many roles in human culture, including as food, in art, in stories, and in mythology and religion. Many of these concern insects, which are important both economically and symbolically, from the work of honeybees to the scarabs of Ancient Egypt. Other arthropods with cultural significance include crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters, and crayfish, which are popular subjects in art, especially still lifes, and arachnids such as spiders and scorpions, whose venom has medical applications. The crab and the scorpion are
Opabinia family tree is that modern tardigrades may be "Opabinia"s closest living evolutionary relatives. Although Zhang and Briggs (2007) disagreed with Budd's diagnosis that "Opabinia"s "triangles" were legs, the resemblance they saw between "Opabinia"s lobe+gill arrangement and arthropods' biramous limbs led them to conclude that "Opabinia" was very closely related to arthropods. In fact they presented a family tree very similar to Budd's except that theirs did not mention tardigrades. "Opabinia" made it clear how little was known about soft-bodied animals, which do not usually leave fossils. When Whittington described it in the mid-1970s, there was already a vigorous debate about