WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Most people go to Hawaii for the golden beaches, the turquoise seas, or the stunning weather. Rosemary Gillespie went for the spiders.

Situated around 2,400 miles from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Islands are about as remote as it's possible for islands to be. In the last 5 million years, they've been repeatedly colonized by far-traveling animals, which then diversified into dozens of new species. Honeycreeper birds, fruit flies, carnivorous caterpillars ... all of these creatures reached Hawaii, and evolved into wondrous arrays of unique forms.

So did the spiders. There are happy-face spiders whose abdomens look like emojis, and which Gillespie started studying in 1987. There are appropriately named long-jawed spiders, which caught her attention years later. Spiders have so repeatedly radiated on Hawaii that scientists often discover entirely new groups of species at once, allowing them to have some taxonomic fun. One genus was named Orsonwelles and each species is named after one of the director's films; another group is named after all the characters from the film Predator. "The diversity is extraordinary," says Gillespie, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley.

The most spectacular of these spider dynasties, Gillespie says, are the stick spiders. They're so-named because some of them have long, distended abdomens that make them look like twigs. "You only see them at night, walking around the understory very slowly," Gillespie says. "They're kind of like sloths." Murderous sloths, though: Their sluggish movements allow them to sneak up on other spiders and kill them.

During the day, stick spiders hide, relying on their camouflage to protect them from the beaks of honeycreepers. Each of Hawaii's islands has species of stick spider that come in three distinctive colors--shiny gold, dark brown, and matte white. Go to Oahu and you'll find all three kinds. Head to East Maui and you'll see the same trio.

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