Four-legged insects, six-legged spiders, and eight-legged crabs

In "The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion" (May 2025), I discuss this image from an English book for preschoolers:

I noted that the black bug looks a lot like a spider but quoted some kids saying this about it:

"Is that one a spider?" asked one of the kids in Chinese.

"No," said one of the others. "It has six legs. If it has six legs, you can be 100% sure it's not a spider."

I then noted Bill's objection to this reasoning:

Bill protested that a spider could have six legs, if it had lost some of its original eight, and in support of this he connected the spider with the octopus and brought in the logo of Hydra, an evil organization in Marvel superhero movies, which looks like an octopus with six tentacles and which has definite Ungoliant energy.

I conceded his point:

I found this synchronistic reasoning convincing. I noted that the the smaller ladybird illustrating the word bug in the sentence above even has four legs, reinforcing the idea that leg-counting is not an infallible way of classifying arthropods.

So we have a ladybird with four legs instead of the usual six, and a spider with six legs instead of the usual eight. As mentioned above, Bill has seen the octopus as being essentially the same symbol as the spider, and the same is true of the crab.

Last night I read this in the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, the title of which refers to the octopus.

At sunset, Sowell Bay’s public beach teems with rock crabs. One summer when Erik was small, the Sullivans were on an after-dinner walk when Erik found one who, by some cruel fate, had lost its hind legs on one side. Naturally, he insisted on bringing it home. He named it Eight-Legged Eddie because it was supposed to have ten limbs and was missing two.

This repeats the theme of arthropods with two fewer legs than the usual number, and the eight-legged crab also reinforces the symbolic connection between the crab and the spider.