And there's actually a spectacular colored dot in the center of the saddles of many species of stomatopods.

So, the saddles that saddle shaped spring has actually been well known to biologists for a long time, not as a spring but as a visual signal.

And so I'm very curious about whether those colored dots in the center of the saddles are conveying some kind of information about their ability to strike, or their strike force, and something about the time period in the molting cycle.

Thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way, sometimes in bunches under the cliffs, with pack saddles and packs where they've fallen from the rock above, sometimes in tangled masses, filling the mud holes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march, often, I regret to say, exhausted, but still alive, a fact we were unaware of, until after the miserable wretches turned beneath the hooves of our cavalcade.