Spiders and I
 

Music is not my hobby, it is my life, it is what I do, it's what I am. If I stop doing it, I have no reason to live, my life would have simply stopped.

My hobby is spiders. I love spiders--all arachnids really but spiders in particular. I can name the vast majority of them right off. Some people watch birds, I watch spiders. I don't collect them (although I did have a pet tarantula once). Spiders need to be free or they can't do much for our ecosystem--which largely depends on them.

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The spider is clearly something that crawled out of the ocean and only changed enough to stay on land but if they chose to go back to the ocean, they could. I don't think a more successful creature exists.

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Starting about 350 million years ago, this sea creature that left the ocean became the spider. We have spiders preserved in amber from that long ago. Amazingly, it has changed not a wit in all that time. 100 million year old bee fossils show us that bees were wasps at once time. Roaches have evolved differently for all kinds of environments. But spiders--no matter that the environment (and they live in all of them), they are no different then they were when they made their first appearance on the planet.

Their hard shells became an exoskeleton, their spiny points became hairs, their slime-producing organs began producing a new improved slime called silk. Like all, ocean creatures, they display high intelligence.

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Tarantulas, wolf, funnel web and trapdoor spiders are called mygalomorphs. These are a more primitive type of spider. They have vertical rather than diagonal fangs, are generally hairy, tarantulas have 6 eyes rather than 8. Mygalomorphs produce silk but don't spin webs. They have two large protruding spinnerets whereas other spiders have 4 to 8 microscopic ones.

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Mygalomorph (pronounced "MIG-a-lo-morf") is a Greek compound of "mugale" or shrew and "morphe" or form. Shrew-form. It looks nothing like a shrew which resembles a mouse with a long, pointed snout.

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They are superb hunters. Unparalleled masters of predation.

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Jumping spiders are classified as salticidae of which there are some 500 genera and 5000 species--the most numerous of any spider family. Unlike most spiders which have poor vision, salticidae have superb vision. Because they are hairy and do not spin webs, they share some common ground with mygalomorphs. But are much more recent--about 50 million years.

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Spiders' eyes are paired and each pair are generally functionally different from the other pairs and are different sizes. Although they look exposed, the eyes have a tough transparent covering. You could touch their eyes with your finger and it won't bother them.

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Jumping spiders' eyes are mounted on a kind of cupola or tower and are elevated over the rest of the body. Markedly different from other spiders. Spiders are built amazingly like the armored vehicles used in the military. That's really what they are--nature's armored vehicles.

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Jumping spiders wear dew drops for hats.

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Cute li'l fella, ain't he?

This is the first thread of yours I like.

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But my favorite spider faces are those of wolf spiders. Evil, frightening and just plain f-ucking cool as hell!

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Like something straight of out Lovecraft.

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No, that's not evil at all!

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The wolf spider's eye array has two up top pointing upwards, always scanning overhead. Then there are two large ones in the middle to see forward and these are the most developed eyes. Then four eyes pointing downwards at different angles to scan the ground. Creepy-looking perhaps but highly effective for survival.

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Spiders are also natural cannibals and will not hesitate to eat one another with as much gusto as they eat insects. Some spiders even specialize in catching other spiders. Spiders are, in fact, as much the hunted as they are the hunter. Birds, snakes, frogs, bats, mantises, wasps, scorpions, lizards and, yes, people find them quite a delicacy. They reportedly taste like crab which makes sense since they are distant relatives.

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I've still seen people uglier than this.

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Man, that's just straight out of nightmare.

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From personal experience, it's easier to hunt spiders in the dark partly because they are nocturnal and partly because their eyes reflect light. Shine a flashlight at night into a patch in your garden or inside an old shed. All those little pin-points of light? Spiders.

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Comedy.

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Tragedy.

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There's something rather disturbing about crab spider eyes, like some amorphous monstrosity staring up from the ocean floor.

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Of course, if looking at all these beady, little eyes bothers you, you can always go with these eyeless mygalomorphs from the Dominican Republic. They spend their entire lives in pitch black caves and so don't need eyes. Oh, yeah, that's far less creepy.

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Some beady little eyes are on the spider's abdomen. Apparently, these marking resemble a face just enough that potential predators decide to look elsewhere.

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Okay, that's just plain weird.

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Some spiders mimic insect compound eyes (in this case, a moth's) to fool potential moth mates to approach and make an overture. It will be their last.

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While most people in developed nations exhibit some spider fear, about 3.5 to 6.1% suffer from extreme fear or arachnophobia. Some celebrities who admit to having it include Justin Timberlake and Christopher Lee. Others include every single female on planet earth. The reason for spider fear is not conclusive.

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Now before we get all creeped-out, remember that spiders enable us to live. They are THE primary insectivore. On average, a single spider devours 2000 insects a year. Without them, we would literally drown in an ocean of insects within a few weeks time. Your house SHOULD have spiders in it and a few centipedes as well. They prevent roach and termite infestations which will destroy your property.

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Spiders demonstrate astonishing intelligence. Certain orb web weavers actually build dummy spiders out of dead insects they've captured and glue the parts together with their silk (which reflect UV rays). When a wasp decides to go get a spider for lunch, their senses, which use UV rays, are fooled into believing the dummy to be real and attack it about 60% of the time giving the spider just enough time to escape. Many military defense mechanisms used on planes, vehicles and ships work on this same principle.

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When I stated earlier than spiders could go back to the ocean if they chose, it was because some already have. Desis martensi build little silk-lined air chambers in rubble left between tides. The tides come in then go out leaving behind stranded marine life that the spiders then come out to eat enjoying a smorgasbord of seafood. The one pictured here is enjoying a shrimp.

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A giant sea spider from Antarctica with a 10" diameter leg span. These were only recently discovered. Their existence came as a complete surprise.

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Arctic sea spider. Much smaller than their Antarctic counterparts.

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The horseshoe crab is NOT a crab but an arthropod very closely related to arachnids. They are so ancient in design as to be considered living fossils. They range in size from a coin to a washtub.

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Horseshoe crabs resemble trilobites a great deal. Trilobites were arthropods from about 500-250 million years ago. One of the first successful macroscopic life forms. In them one also sees centipedes. millipedes, sow bugs and other creatures. They ranged from small to very large in size and were very diverse. This fossil is from my own collection.

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One can see how a trilobite-like creature could eventually evolve into the spider.

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Australian funnel web spider--very toxic.

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As dangerous as this spider's bite is, she is a lovely spider in her own little way.

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Australian funnel web spider with mites around her beady, little eyes. These mites are not parasitical but simply use her to get around.

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Trapdoor spiders are the coolest spiders due to their strange colors, shapes and markings. This sun trapdoor spider likes like it was spray-painted.

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Trapdoor spiders are mygalomorphs but unlike tarantulas and wolf spiders are not particularly hairy. They are also not as venomous as funnel web spiders.

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Strangely elongated abdomen of a trapdoor spider.

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Yet the ravine trapdoor spider has a truncated abdomen.

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The ravine trapdoor is called Cyclocosmia truncata. The blunt end of her abdomen bears an unusual marking that resembles an emblem or a Mayan calendar.

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What does she do with that strange flat area? It's very tough and ribbed so she uses it to block the entrance to her burrow. To a small predator looking to snack on a spider or take over her burrow, she blocks it with what may as well be a big slab of concrete. Their burrows are very well disguised and hard to find.

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The brown recluse has a face like a weird female doll.

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See it? The doll face?

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The brown recluse has a marking on her back that resembles a violin.

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But with the face and the violin marking combined, it resembles a ponytail with ribbons.

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But the little doll face has a very nasty bite.

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Another deadly lady--the black widow.

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Her somewhat homelier cousin, the western brown widow.

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But I came to praise the spider not squash her. She is here to do a job and she does it very well, so well that the ecosystem as it is could not function without her.

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Instead of killing these creatures whenever we see them, we should consider them custodians that will only accept as payment the bugs that compete with us for our living space and our food. Without the spider, those bugs would win--easily. The free service they provide for us--absolutely essential to our continued survival and that's all the thanks they get from us--killed. We display the most pathetic fear of them. We are hundreds of time bigger and thousands of time heavier and we act like the biggest cowards when confronted by a creature that does us no harm when left alone.

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They can live without us but we cannot live without them. This is their world, not ours. We are their guests for as long as they feel like putting up with us. They are not disgusting poisoners--we are. And we had better check our arrogance and grotesque fear at the door and starting giving the spiders the respect they deserve. They'll outlast us and that's good. Most of us don't realize just how good that is.

Brian Eno - Spider and I [Music Video] - YouTube

Only Brian Eno could write something this beautiful for our 8-legged friends.

The poecilotheria metallica is pretty goddamn bitchin'.

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Dude, either put those pics in spoilers or warn us in the title that there are pics of giant, hideous, nightmare-inducing spiders that will make me need to change my underwear.

I ****ing love spiders. Here are some pictures I put on instagram:

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This one above was like, Mr Burns doing the "exceeelentttt" movement with his hands.

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There is one on my new place that I need to take a photo of.

The thread's titled "Spiders and I". Of course there are spiders in it.

I'll do a weeks worth of cardio after walking through a spider web. :eek:

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"If you wish to live and thrive, let the spider run alive."--Proverb from the Middle Ages.
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There's been a nest of black widows somewhere in the house. Normally I'd live and let live with them because they help keep down the flies, but I have cats and a dog and while they might not be deadly to me, they are to them so they meet a sad end with the vacuum.

I see we both have trouble with the super spiders. If we find four more people we can be the Sinister Six.

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The dream catchers of American Indian lore are stylized spider webs. The original dream catcher was said to be woven by Iktomi, the trickster god of Sioux lore who takes the form of a spider.

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Anansi is a trickster god of west African lore and thought to originate in Ghana. He is sometimes a spider, sometimes a spider with human traits and sometimes a human with spider traits. Anansi plays a huge role in the mythology of West Africa.

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Jorogumo is a Japanese kind of predatory spirit, also a trickster, who takes the form of a beautiful woman to entice men to their deaths by devouring. The bizarre Japanese horror movie "Audition" depicted this.

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The most important god of the fierce South American tribe, the Moche, was Ai Apaec, the Decapitator, whom they depicted as a spider. In his name, the Moche took the heads of their prisoners captured in battle. Here he holds a human head in his rear legs.

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The Indians who made the amazing lines at Nazca thought highly enough of the spider to depict her.

Thank you for that. I've been meaning to see that movie and I was hoping someone would spoil the plot twist for me. :finger:

I wouldn't assume they couldn't be deadly to you. That venom is 10 times more powerful than a rattlesnake's. You can't have those in your house. Same with the brown recluse. You just cannot afford to be bitten. I was talking about wolf spiders and the kind that spin a little web in the corner. They're harmless and keep down the vermin.

Spiders in the house are self-regulating. They go after the pests and, if they do too good of a job, will turn on each other so they won't overpopulate. I had a buddy who bought a house with so many spiders he began wiping them out. The walls were actually covered with silk. I knew his property needed to be condemned because you normally just can't get that many spiders because they'll devour each other. Since they weren't then it meant he had a bad insect infestation. Killing the spiders would only reveal that to him and it did. He moved out and let the bank foreclose on the house. It's still standing though and that was over a decade ago.

Wolf spiders also leave quite a bite on humans (not deadly but certainly uncomfortable for a few days, maybe longer). I always catch spiders and let em go outside.

Diving Bell Spider

This one is particularly interesting to me:
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A family was driven from their suburban St. Louis home by thousands of venomous spiders that fell from the ceiling and oozed from the walls.

Brian and Susan Trost bought the $450,000 home overlooking two golf holes at Whitmoor Country Club in Weldon Spring in October 2007 and soon afterward started seeing brown recluse spiders everywhere, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported . Once when showering, Susan Trost dodged a spider as it fell from the ceiling and washed down the drain.

She told St. Louis television station KMOV-TV in 2012 the spiders "started bleeding out of the walls," and at least two pest control companies were unable to eradicate the infestation.

The couple filed a claim in 2008 with their insurance company, State Farm, and a lawsuit against the home's previous owners for not disclosing the brown recluse problem.

At a civil trial in St. Charles County in October 2011, University of Kansas biology professor Jamel Sandidge — considered one of the nation's leading brown recluse researchers — estimated there were between 4,500 and 6,000 spiders in the home. Making matters worse, he said, those calculations were made in the winter when the spiders are least active. <snip>

Spiders Force Family From of Upscale Missouri Home - ABC News

Talk about walls ooozing.

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What movie is that? I didn't know those 2 did a movie together.

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Even though I don't collect spiders anymore and believe they should be left alone to do whatever it is they like to do, somebody gave me one of these for my birthday. Apparently, they are plentiful in China and Vietnam. It is classified as "Eurypeima spinicrus." That immediately raised suspicions since in all my years of spider-studying, I have never encountered a naming convention as that. I looked it up and found that it is even more commonly called "Eurypelma spinicrus" and that the name is apparently meaningless.

Google definitions even translates the name as "Preserved spider in a framed box." Works for me.

So what IS this spider then? Not sure. A bird spider of some kind resembling some I have seen in Texas. In fact, I am at least 50% convinced that it is American. The only tarantulas I know of in China and Vietnam are the earth tigers named for the distinctive tiger-like markings on the abdomen:

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Malaysian Earth Tiger. Very beautiful spider. Even a chickens-hit like Batlord would have to admit that this is a very lovely spider.

But the boxed-up spider looks more like this:

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This is a California bird spider. The only problem is, abdomen is too big. the spider in the box has a small abdomen. Is it just shriveled by the preservation process? No. I've seen a number of living tarantulas that have abdomens like that such as:

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A very large tarantula native to Borneo. It is definitely not the spider in the box but resembles it. So I am afraid that, at the moment, I can't say for certain what Eurypelma spinicrus actually is. Until better data come along, I still say it is a bird spider of the American southwest.

Btw, "tarantula" is a misnomer. The real tarantula is a wolf spider native to southern Italy. It was believed that if one bit you, you would fall into a frantic dance or that the venom had to be danced out of your system. In the town of Taranto, such a dance developed and evolved and that is where the spider gets its name. The dance is called the tarantella and is still done in southern Italy and in Argentina.

In reality, the tarantella has been traced back as far as 1100 BCE and was likely a dance of ecstasy, i.e. a frantic dance that allows the dancer to reach state of communing with a god or gods which has its roots in shamanism. The tarantella was like an ancient Roman bacchanalian rite. When the Church moved to stamp it out (no pun intended), the dance was disguised as something brought on by a spider bite or as therapy for a spider bite.

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The tarantella is performed with tambourines shook in 4/4 or 6/8 time. Its connections to shamanism is apparent when we realize that most of the voodoo drumbeats done for their ecstatic dances are in 6/8 time--a very primal-sounding beat.


Classic Tarantella Calabrese - Zingarota (Gypsy) - Salvatore Ida - YouTube
Gypsy tarantella.

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Lycosa tarantula--the little lady blamed for the dance. Whether the dance was always, in some way, connected to an ancient spider deity as Anansi would be an interesting research project.

If there is a God, and he really did create everything in 7 days, then spiders are proof positive that he took acid on 1 of those days.

Dude, you're scared ****less of spiders, right? Are you visiting this thread just to comment on how much they freak you out? Because that's pretty weird.

Human beings are proof he used meth.

The ash-tree (1931 ed.) by M.R. James

Short story for the Batlord. I first read it as a young boy and fell in love with it. Good one for Halloween.

Speaking of spiders, when I lived back east I built a rec room in a basement of the house I owned. The basement had a raised wooden floor that had been installed decades earlier. I needed to rip it out as part of the renovation.

Man, I encountered so many freaking spiders underneath that thing. All different sizes and types. The only good part of it all is that I'm not afraid of things any more. I never kill them if I find them in the house cause I think it's bad luck.

But then again, we don't have ones like in the OP around here - at least I've never seen one!

Btw, I stopped by that house I mentioned in an earlier post that my buddy abandoned because of the bug infestation. There was a guy and his wife doing yard work. I asked them if they still had a bug problem. He said that they had a severe problem when they moved in and for a couple of years afterward and thought seriously about moving. Then they got a letter from the city informing them that they would have to have city water piped in or face fines and court appearances, their house used well water. I remember that too, my buddy told me that it was on well water. So they called in some guys to do the renovation (they had to finance it, the city did nothing for them).

They guys had to pry up the floor in the bathroom which sat over the well. He said it looked like the catacombs under the castle in that Indiana Jones movie--every type of bug and arachnid was down in that well. They were floating in the water too. Those people and my buddy bathed in and drank that water!!! So many came up into the bathroom that they had to bring in an exterminator to hunt them all down. But that made sense too because I always remembered the infestation was worst in the bathroom and every time my buddy cleaned the bugs out of his house, it would start again in the bathroom first.

The guy said they shined a flashlight down there and the well walls were covered with spiders, beetles, centipedes (they were huge too!), silverfish and dozens and dozens of other bugs he could not identify and never knew even existed. They just sealed it over with concrete and wooden planks--sealing all the creepy-crawlies inside where they would eventually die because there was not other way out.

After that, no more bug problem. So if you're buying a house, it might be a good idea not to have well water.

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Coming into this thread is like licking a cold sore in your mouth. You know you shouldn't. You know it's just going to make things worse. But you just can't help yourself. Besides, I was called out by name.

My skin is crawling from looking at all these pictures of spiders!

I think they're cool, but they also freak the hell out of me.

Alone this summer, my fiance and I have killed at least fifty plus house spiders alone, ranging from the size of quarters, to nearly a small saucer plate!

Does the name of your country start with an "A" and end with "ustralia"?

It does start with an A, when shortened. But it isn't Australia.

America, actually. I don't think I could live in Australia, spiders look to be bigger there, not to mention a lot of your more deadly or poisonous spiders live in Australia. America has it's own deadly bunch too, but I tend to think Australia has the deadlier dozen.

The following article was in the news today:

Piotr Naskrecki was taking a nighttime walk in a rainforest in Guyana, when he heard rustling as if something were creeping underfoot. When he turned on his flashlight, he expected to see a small mammal, such as a possum or a rat.

"When I turned on the light, I couldn't quite understand what I was seeing," said Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

A moment later, he realized he was looking not at a brown, furry mammal, but an enormous, puppy-size spider.

PHOTOS: Fish-Eating Spiders Found Around the World
Known as the South American Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), the colossal arachnid is the world's largest spider, according to Guinness World Records. Its leg span can reach up to a foot (30 centimeters), or about the size of "a child's forearm," with a body the size of "a large fist," Naskrecki told Live Science. And the spider can weigh more than 6 oz. (170 grams) — about as much as a young puppy, the scientist wrote on his blog. [See Photos of the Goliath Birdeater Spider]

Some sources say the giant huntsman spider, which has a larger leg span, is bigger than the birdeater. But the huntsman is much more delicate than the hefty birdeater — comparing the two would be "like comparing a giraffe to an elephant," Naskrecki said.

The birdeater's enormous size is evident from the sounds it makes. "Its feet have hardened tips and claws that produce a very distinct, clicking sound, not unlike that of a horse's hooves hitting the ground," he wrote, but "not as loud."

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Supposedly has fangs 2 inches long! While a bite wouldn't be fatal it would certainly hurt like a bastard. So, Batlord, if you're through s-hitting your pants, you can start s-hitting them again.

Puppy-Sized Spider Romps in Rainforest : Discovery News

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Big Spider Attacks Daddy - YouTube

I don't give a **** how endangered that thing might be. If I go to South America, I'm bringing a gun---well, I'm buying a gun when I get there so that I don't get put on a terrorist watch list---and if I see that thing, I'm emptying a clip into it.