On to some natural history, diversity, and odd evolutionary products, this time in the spiders .
Spiders are members of the large arthropod group called arachnids .
This group includes the other eight-legged crawlers of the world, including scorpions, ticks and mites. I'll show you a brief segment of a video made of soil arthropods in order to see a range of arachnids. Small organisms, a relatively unexplored part of the ecosystem, . . . This is an amateur video that was made at OSU by the same entomologist who we recently saw collecting arthropod samples off tree limbs in the video on old-growth Douglas fir forests. The vast majority of the plant material that rains down on the forest floor passes through the gut of this animal.