June Morphology Fail

Here’s another Taxonomy Morphology Fail for your edification and/or entertainment.  See if you can spot this one.

I present:

Pedipalps are not, as it would happen, gonads.  In male spiders these modified mouthparts* are sometimes called “boxing gloves.”  While they are used to transfer sperm from the male spider’s reproductive organs to the female’s, they are not in any way involved with sperm production.

I would expand upon the boxing glove sperm delivery analogy but it gets unsettlingly pornographic very quickly.

via Discovery News

*To be more accurate pedipalps are probably homologous to crustaceans’ second pair of antennae.