An Arachnophobe Pays Homage to the Spider
Back in my footloose twenties, I lived for a year in Costa Rica, where I worked at a school in the central highlands and worked even harder, by reluctant necessity, at overcoming my lifelong horror of crawly things. Before the Costa Rican tourism board comes after me, I will say, in defense of that part of the world, that I have never lived anywhere else so ecologically magnificent. Every day, I commuted to work on a trail lined with ferns and bromeliads and the enchanted fortresses of strangler figs, while two-toed sloths lolled overhead and butterflies as big as greeting cards opened their dull-brown wings to reveal a blue as brilliant as the cloak of the Virgin Mary. At night, the moon cast shadows of avocado trees along the dirt roads, and the stars amassed in layers a billion deep. There were volcanoes, there were waterfalls, there were three kinds of monkeys, there was a dry season and a wet season and in between them an entire rainbow season, as if the local weather had been designed by Lisa Frank. On clear days, I would look out over verdant folds of mountains to where the sun glinted off the Pacific Ocean and reckon myself pretty much in paradise.
Still, there is a snake in every garden—though it was not the nation’s infamous pit vipers that scared me. Before taking the job, I had not appreciated the biological coördinates of Costa Rica: south of the Tropic of Cancer, north of the Tropic of Capricorn, right in the middle of the Arthropod Zone. Once I got there, however, this fact became appallingly unignorable. My roommates in my new house included ants that looked like “Star Wars” extras, beetles that looked like U.S. Army-issue vehicles, and scorpions that unfortunately looked exactly like scorpions and made themselves at home in my sock drawer. At night, mosquitoes gloated in my ear, and heavyset moths, furry enough to be mammals, and big enough, too, ricocheted around my bedroom walls, sounding like the opening scene of “Apocalypse Now.”
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All this I could have lived with, however unhappily. But I was completely, abjectly, characterologically, and possibly clinically unprepared to deal with the spiders. The scale of this problem made itself clear soon after I arrived, when I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water and—YAGGGRRHAAAAAHHHHHH! The creature in my sink was thick, hairy, hideous, Halloween-ready in its outfit of orange and black, and easily the size of my hand: as I later learned, a Costa Rican red-leg tarantula. That species is formally known as Megaphobema mesomelas, and if you guessed that the first part translates roughly as “gigantic and terrifying,” you’re right. This particular one had crawled into my sink from, I presume, the depths of our collective psyche, and looked like the result of a collaboration between Stephen King, Louise Bourgeois, and Hieronymus Bosch. I made a noise that must have been audible in Guatemala, leapt backward through the air a good six feet, and flattened myself against a wall.
What was I supposed to do? Like every self-respecting arachnophobe, I had spent my entire life prior to that moment making sure that I was never alone in a room with an arachnid—not even, say, a daddy longlegs, a perfectly harmless creature weighing perhaps a hundredth of an ounce. Now here I was, alone not only in a room but effectively in a nation, confronted by a quarter pound of spider flesh. Yet I couldn’t kill the creature, not because I had, in the moment, any ethical or sentimental objection to doing so but because I couldn’t think of a nearby weapon certain to do the trick. Plus, no way was I getting close enough to deal the fatal blow or, heaven forbid, hear the dying crunch of that enormous carapace. My feelings about spiders were the opposite of those old Wild West posters: I didn’t want them dead or alive. I didn’t even want them imaginary; I had been known to close books and flip over magazines to avoid having to see some particularly loathsome member of the order Araneae.
Perhaps you share this feeling. Perhaps you, too, have spent your life self-evacuating from rooms with suspiciously shaped cracks in the ceiling; perhaps even reading this is making your skin crawl. In that case, you will understand why I not only fled my house that day but seriously considered fleeing the country. What’s harder to understand is why, a couple of months ago, having long since left Costa Rica but having never left behind my intense arachnophobia, I decided to pick up a copy of “The Lives of Spiders” (Princeton), by Ximena Nelson, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. What can I say? It was November; all around me, people were obsessively reading about things they feared and despised, in the hope that comprehension could lead to compassion and change. For my part, I figured I’d start small.
“The Lives of Spiders” is an unusual volume: part textbook, part encyclopedia, part coffee-table book for those whose taste in décor runs toward shabby eek. Its detailed scientific information is conveyed with endearing if not entirely contagious enthusiasm and accompanied by full-page photographs, which someone who is not me might possibly regard as beautiful. In addition to excurses on spider ecology, biology, and behavior, it contains miniature biographies of forty distinct species.
That is, I regret to report, a tiny fraction of the total number. To date, we know of some fifty thousand spider species, though, like this magazine, they are hard to keep up with, since new ones pile up every week. Scientists suspect the true number is at least double that, while the number of individual spiders likely clocks in somewhere north of fifteen quadrillion. These are not evenly distributed across ecosystems, of course, but you cannot escape them anywhere except Antarctica. Like us, spiders are geographically intrepid. They thrive across rain forests, cloud forests, boreal forests, grasslands, wetlands, deserts, savannas, steppes, caves, mountains, marshes, and bogs. One species, the diving-bell spider, builds its web beneath the surface of lakes and ponds, attaches an air bubble to it for breathing, and lives out its days underwater. Within these diverse environs, spiders distribute themselves the way Manhattanites do, crowding in at every level from garden apartment to penthouse. In your average patch of Eastern woodlands, there will be spiders burrowing beneath the soil, scuttling through the leaf litter, crouching in the bushes, dangling from the tree limbs, and spinning webs high up in the canopy. If your reaction to this is to vow to spend more time in the great indoors, you underestimate your nemesis; one recent study of private homes in North Carolina found spiders in one hundred per cent of them.
As you might expect of a zoological order capable of living anywhere from the Mongolian steppe to a ranch house in Fayetteville, spiders are remarkably diversified. They range in size from a hundredth of an inch to five inches across—and that’s just their bodies, because arachnologists, who clearly don’t think like the rest of us, generally do not include leg length when reporting the size of a spider. (To appreciate the psychological failure of this descriptive practice, consider the giant huntsman spider: technically an inch long, which is bad enough, but throw in the legs and the creature is a full foot from end to end.) Other characteristics vary just as widely. Some spiders live for less than a year, like mayflies, while others live for more than forty, like camels. Some have eight eyes, while others have none. Some female spiders lay a single egg, while others lay more than three thousand.
Still, there are some things that all spiders have in common, beyond their ability to make me levitate. Most obviously, they all belong to the class Arachnida, a spectacularly unlovable limb of the tree of life whose other members include scorpions, mites, and ticks. All Arachnida have eight legs (and, outside of the microscopic tardigrade, only Arachnida have eight legs; do not malign the wonderful octopus, which has eight arms). Also, all spiders are predators. There is one partial exception to this rule, Bagheera kiplingi, a largely herbivorous spider native to Mexico and Central America. Some other species will occasionally nibble on a plant, technically making them omnivores, but, on the whole, what distinguishes the spiderly appetite is its stunning carnivorousness. Collectively, spiders eat at least half a billion pounds of meat per year, more than the amount consumed by human beings.
What exactly do these voracious flesh-eating creatures consume? Insects, of course. Also: fish, tadpoles, frogs, lizards, and the occasional vertebrate—mice, shrews, voles, bats. The largest spider, the Goliath birdeater tarantula, does, in fact, eat birds. One spider, Evarcha culicivora, which lives in Kenya and Uganda, feeds almost entirely on us, although, thank goodness, indirectly: its preferred diet is mosquitoes engorged with human blood.
Another thing spiders eat with great gusto is one another. Every known variety of spider can engage in cannibalism, and some do so with particular enthusiasm, most often during or immediately after copulation, with the female almost always doing the eating. Up to eighty per cent of male wasp spiders, for instance, get eaten during their first attempt at mating, and some male widow spiders, apparently resigned to their fate, deliberately flip themselves over after sex in order to be consumed. Male dark fishing spiders, meanwhile, die spontaneously during sex, saving the females the trouble of killing them prior to dinner. In some species, a female spider will let herself be devoured by her spiderlings, a behavior known as suicidal maternal care. Then, there are the many spiders that simply stalk their fellow-arachnids, killing and eating them as ruthlessly as if they were no more closely related than we are to turkeys and tuna.
If I were a spider, in short, I would still be afraid of spiders. As an order, they possess a whole suite of lethal characteristics and abilities, capable of ambushing, snaring, swarming, or deceiving their prey. To these ends, they are equipped with more cognitive dexterity than you might imagine, plus tooth-like structures, tarsal claws, and fangs, which, in the magnified images in Nelson’s book, look like they could belong to, respectively, great white sharks, jaguars, and Carmilla. But the most effective weapons of the spider, not to mention the ones most central to its fearsome reputation, are the arachnid equivalents of the iron fist in the velvet glove: venom and silk.
Whatever your feelings about spiders, spider silk is an astonishing material. Although a strand of it is far skinnier than a human hair, it has more tensile strength than steel and can absorb more impact than Kevlar. That’s partly because it’s also extremely ductile, meaning it can stretch many times its normal length before breaking, which is why a bird can fly straight into a web without destroying it. Conveniently for spiders, silk also super-contracts when wet. Subject it to a good rainstorm and, no matter how much it has been stretched and strained, it will return to its original condition.
This ultra-tough material starts out as a liquid, stored in glands in the spider’s abdomen. From there, it flows into organs called spinnerets, of which a spider may have up to eight, “each ending in tiny spigots,” as Nelson writes. The spider then extrudes the silk manually, so to speak, pulling it out of a spinneret with its hind legs and thereby realigning the protein molecules so that the formerly liquid substance turns solid. Whether you regard this as evidence of the awesome inventiveness of nature or of the deeply alien creepiness of spiders is a matter of perspective.
Either way, the number of things that spiders can do with their silk would impress even E. B. White. Most obviously, they can use it to build webs, which range in size from half an inch in diameter to thirty square feet and in sophistication from simple triangles to elaborate spirals and funnels. Because webs co-evolved with insects, and therefore with the rise of insect flight, they can be found not only stretched across ground cover and rocks but also in vertical sheets that can sometimes span entire rivers. For reasons that remain somewhat mysterious, certain spider species decorate their webs with bits of plant matter or the mutilated remains of victims, like Charles II hanging the head of Oliver Cromwell on Westminster Hall. Others decorate with the silk itself, the most famous and enigmatic example being the St. Andrew’s Cross spider, which weaves a cross into the center of its web.
