Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick
Speaker 1: and Robert. You have seen the horror movies of the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, I know you've delve deep into I've seen
Speaker 1: a lot of them, and the ones I haven't seen,
Speaker 1: I've I've watched the trailers. I mean, sometimes that's the
Speaker 1: best way to enjoy a film. They put all the
Speaker 1: best stuff in the trailers. But what was big then?
Speaker 1: It was atomic age panic, right, Yeah, giant animals exactly right.
Speaker 1: So there's nuclear testing, there's atomic radiation, and suddenly animals
Speaker 1: become very big. And one of the animals they would
Speaker 1: make very big, you know quite well, was the spider.
Speaker 1: That's right. I mean with all of them, all you
Speaker 1: need is a little camera magic, and you can make
Speaker 1: anything look big. You didn't have to worry about having
Speaker 1: some sort of fancy stop motion creature. You didn't have
Speaker 1: to worry certainly with c g I or costumes. You're
Speaker 1: just an actual spider. Yeah, film a tarantula and then
Speaker 1: put it in the background, you know, superimposed with the
Speaker 1: different sizes. Yeah, But so there's a sequence and pretty
Speaker 1: much all these movies. I probably haven't seen them all,
Speaker 1: but I've seen some of them where the spider lives
Speaker 1: in a cave or something like that, and the people
Speaker 1: are wandering near the cave and then somebody falls into
Speaker 1: its web and the web is a hammock. It's just
Speaker 1: a hann't it. It's a piece of like it's white
Speaker 1: rope netting. Uh. And people get stuck to the hammock
Speaker 1: and then the spiders coming. Sometimes they escape, sometimes it
Speaker 1: eats them. It's generally a bella legostie pretends to wrestle
Speaker 1: a rubber octopus level of awkward because you're like struggling
Speaker 1: the hammock. Just just get up and get out of it.
Speaker 1: You're clearly not stuck, right. But there's a part we
Speaker 1: never see right now. Often the person gets away. If
Speaker 1: the person gets eaten by the giant spider, we just
Speaker 1: sort of see like a ah, and then the spiders approaching.
Speaker 1: The music swells in. That's it. What happens after that cutaway? Well,
Speaker 1: sometimes we find their bones later, sometimes their their their
Speaker 1: cocoon body shows up later. But I can't think of
Speaker 1: a film off hand that had a prolonged spider cut
Speaker 1: death by spider death scene. I guess they really didn't
Speaker 1: go for the intense, gross outgore scenes like that in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties. But even if they did, what would
Speaker 1: they be showing what actually happens when a spider eats
Speaker 1: something at that scale? And that's going to be the
Speaker 1: topic of today's conversation. So we're gonna imagine a nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties Roger Corman atomic radiation movie, but we're gonna take
Speaker 1: it to the next level and go beyond that cut away.
Speaker 1: The movie is I was eaten by a giant spider.
Speaker 1: But I guess first I should ask, for real, what's
Speaker 1: your favorite giant spider movie? Oh? I mean, anytime a
Speaker 1: giant spider turns up mir in for a good time.
Speaker 1: I tend to lean more towards the stop motion ones.
Speaker 1: Let's see, The Giant Spider Invasion is a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Never seen that this one? Who was an MST? Really yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It's really good. They're really good. It was
Speaker 1: a really great MST episode. They they used actual spiders,
Speaker 1: as I recall, and there's a there's this like really
Speaker 1: gross kind of hillbilly character in it, and giant spiders
Speaker 1: and somebody drives a car into a giant spider. How
Speaker 1: big are the giant spiders? They are like construction equipment
Speaker 1: big like, so they're ridiculous in terms of size. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, another one I remember from Mystery Science Theater
Speaker 1: three thousand is the I think Horrors of Spider Island.
Speaker 1: That's a good one. That one. That one's one that
Speaker 1: was like it was black and white. It's just a
Speaker 1: real sleezy feel to it because it's like a bunch
Speaker 1: of babes and like one very greased up muscleman that
Speaker 1: are trapped in the island. He turned. It's it's like
Speaker 1: a it's like a dude who has a bunch of
Speaker 1: ladies who work on some nightclub act and they crash
Speaker 1: on a spider island. I haven't seen that one, fairly contrived.
Speaker 1: Come on, I haven't seen that one in years, but
Speaker 1: I do remember, like it's a sweaty looking movie, and
Speaker 1: I remember watching it on VHS and a very sweaty
Speaker 1: college dorm. So it's just like I'm just sitting there
Speaker 1: sweating at night, get my night sweats on, and here's
Speaker 1: this just sweaty, weird, oppressive movie. Now, of course, another
Speaker 1: big point that I'm sure a lot of you listening
Speaker 1: right now are screaming. Is she labbed from Lord of
Speaker 1: the Rings. I remember that from the movies. But can
Speaker 1: I can I admit a little secret good? I've never
Speaker 1: actually read the Lord of the Rings books in full.
Speaker 1: I probably like the only nerd around here who would
Speaker 1: admit that and expect to get out alive. Well, they're good?
Speaker 1: Is that a call? I? I can't read them again until,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe I'll read them with my son or something.
Speaker 1: But I kept telling myself, I'll read them again when
Speaker 1: I get the film adaptation is kind of out of
Speaker 1: my head because I don't want to read them again
Speaker 1: and have those visuals and informant, though the visuals were
Speaker 1: often very good. In fact, I would say that the
Speaker 1: giant spider she loved in the first Lord of the
Speaker 1: Ring film, I think the second, the third one. The
Speaker 1: third one I can't remember because I can't remember where
Speaker 1: that where she shows up in the she shows us
Speaker 1: versus the movies in the third movie when the Hobbits
Speaker 1: are here, we can okay, So the Hobbits are in
Speaker 1: more door, the evil land where you know they're towards
Speaker 1: the end of their journey, but a big spider attacks. Okay,
Speaker 1: I guess it was the third movie. It's the movie
Speaker 1: is kind of blurred together for me, but but I
Speaker 1: thought that that scene was fabulous. Like the spider the
Speaker 1: computer animated is just perfect. Yeah, it's like it's basically
Speaker 1: a huge tarantula. We also, though in Lord of the Rings,
Speaker 1: never see exactly what would happen if the spider began
Speaker 1: to feed. We see it bite somebody and cocoon them,
Speaker 1: but it never starts to eat anybody. I have a
Speaker 1: vague memory that the cinematic version of Sheilab also had
Speaker 1: confusing anatomy, but there were there were aspects about it,
Speaker 1: and certainly it's perfectly fine for a monster spider from
Speaker 1: a fantasy uh product to have monstrous features that don't
Speaker 1: line up with with actual real world spider biology. Like
Speaker 1: I think she had a stinger or something. Maybe there
Speaker 1: was some positor acually, I'm not sure what. Yeah, stinger
Speaker 1: where like the silk spin orrets should have been. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember she kind of like uh pegged Sam with
Speaker 1: it at and that was kind of strange. But yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: here's another one that I remember but not very well.
Speaker 1: Doesn't doesn't Tim Curry turn into a spider at the
Speaker 1: end of the movie? It? Yes, the uh, the the
Speaker 1: nine TV miniseries. Uh, if you're like me, you probably
Speaker 1: have fun and disturbing memories of this. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: a book I read, probably too early, and then that
Speaker 1: film came out, And of course Tim Curry is perfect
Speaker 1: as Pennywise, the dancey clown and traumatized the whole generation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as we've said on this show before, any movie that
Speaker 1: Tim Curry's in, he's the best part. Try to think
Speaker 1: of a counter example. You can't. Yeah, he was great
Speaker 1: and and particularly he was great in the first half
Speaker 1: of that mini series, which was mostly the kid's stuff,
Speaker 1: and that was the most effective part of that mini series.
Speaker 1: I think the second part not as strong, and it
Speaker 1: did include a big showdown with with it in a
Speaker 1: giant alien spider form. Actually just looked it up on
Speaker 1: YouTube and watched it before we came in here, and uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's an impressive looking spider. It looks like a
Speaker 1: large animatronic kind of spider. So I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's really terrifying, but it is kind of a neat design. Okay,
Speaker 1: definitely come out of a drain or something. They go
Speaker 1: into a cave and then it has like it it shines,
Speaker 1: it's dead lights through its u Torso I should I
Speaker 1: should do some sort of like a monster the wheat
Speaker 1: breakdown of it on the blog because it's an interesting
Speaker 1: looking credit, but probably not another non scientifically perfect spider. Yeah,
Speaker 1: even less so. And you know it's a it's a creature.
Speaker 1: It's like out from the Toto's Darkness or whatever, so
Speaker 1: you know it's it can get away with being completely alien.
Speaker 1: But there are plenty of other cinematic giant spiders that
Speaker 1: are look more like spiders, behave more like spiders. I
Speaker 1: instantly think of Krul. Of course, there's a fabulous sequence
Speaker 1: in there with a spider like she's like a spider queen,
Speaker 1: and they're giant spiders all along the web and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of the adventuring party has to make their
Speaker 1: way across it gets stuck on a hammock? Is it
Speaker 1: basically a hammock? And Krall I think think that I
Speaker 1: want to remember it being a little more believable than
Speaker 1: that because so many of the effects and Kral are
Speaker 1: pretty top notch, but but I don't specifically remember. I
Speaker 1: think it was a stop motion spider though I see
Speaker 1: you have a note here Robert about an ewalk adventure. Yes, so, um,
Speaker 1: we have a lot of Star Wars fans in the office. Um,
Speaker 1: or at least we have Holly, and Holly is enough
Speaker 1: of a Star Wars fan to like represent multiple people.
Speaker 1: I think she's like she is. She's a true mendous
Speaker 1: Star Wars fan, and I know that she has a
Speaker 1: warm spound her heart for these as well. Some people
Speaker 1: don't care for him. But there were a couple of
Speaker 1: live action Ewok made for TV films that came out.
Speaker 1: The first one was Urs Caravan of Courage and Ewok Adventure,
Speaker 1: and that one features a giant some giant spiders on
Speaker 1: a web. It's been a long time since I've seen
Speaker 1: that one, and I remember it being good but also
Speaker 1: kind of traumatic because there's a lot of like people
Speaker 1: losing their family members in it. Um. But then there's
Speaker 1: also a follow up. I think it's the Battle for Indoor,
Speaker 1: and that one's that I have a lot of fun
Speaker 1: memories of that one. Would watch that one over and
Speaker 1: over again VHS because it has essentially orcs in it.
Speaker 1: It has an evil, uh seductive like raven queen who
Speaker 1: can turn herself into a raven with a magic ring.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a crash spaceship and it's pilot is
Speaker 1: Wilford Brimley, who so it's a it's a true that
Speaker 1: that's tremendous film too, but only the first one has
Speaker 1: a giant spider and finally a more recent giant spider.
Speaker 1: Not two giants, but giant enough to be disturbing. If
Speaker 1: anyone out there is currently watching the latest season of
Speaker 1: Black Mirror on Netflix, the second episode, I believe is
Speaker 1: is wonderful horror Halloween viewing, and does include a scene
Speaker 1: with a monstrous spider, But I say, I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to check that out this weekend. Anyway, I wanted to
Speaker 1: move on to the next thing, which is that today
Speaker 1: we are going to be talking about people getting eaten
Speaker 1: by giant spiders. But uh, I want to frame this
Speaker 1: with a reminder that it is simply wrong in my
Speaker 1: point of view to contribute to global spider panic, and
Speaker 1: I will not allow us to contribute to global spider panic,
Speaker 1: even if only by accident. Spiders are not your enemy.
Speaker 1: If you're a human and the spider is a normal
Speaker 1: sized spider, that's not you know, at least ten times
Speaker 1: bigger than the biggest spider could ever get. Spiders are
Speaker 1: are not something to worry about. They generally pose no
Speaker 1: threat to humans, with the small exceptions of a few
Speaker 1: species that even those are not something you should really
Speaker 1: worry about. There's no good reason you need to go
Speaker 1: around squashing spiders, and in fact, you would probably find
Speaker 1: a world without spiders utterly intolerable. They make it okay
Speaker 1: for us to live on this planet. Now, now, Joe,
Speaker 1: I know some people are thinking right now and maybe
Speaker 1: even writing the email. They're gonna say, Hey, what about
Speaker 1: the black woodow spiders and the brown reclusives that live
Speaker 1: in my shed? Should I not kill those on site?
Speaker 1: Should I allow those? Why do you need to kill them?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean a lot of people would
Speaker 1: argue that is saying, I this is my shed, this
Speaker 1: is where I go to get my tools. I don't
Speaker 1: want to grab a hoe and then have a black
Speaker 1: woo spider stingy. Well, I don't know're not sting me
Speaker 1: rather but bite me? Sting still with his little stick
Speaker 1: to my brain. I mean, I guess I can't argue
Speaker 1: with what you do in your shed, but but I
Speaker 1: I don't. We do not want to push an anti
Speaker 1: spider message here. Spy piers, spiders perform essential services for
Speaker 1: human beings and really all the other creatures on Earth.
Speaker 1: I would say one of the primary things is insectivorous services.
Speaker 1: So spiders are primary predators that prey on insects. Imagine
Speaker 1: a world in which the primary control on insect populations
Speaker 1: is gone. You know, we've just squashed them all because
Speaker 1: we didn't like the way they looked, or we were
Speaker 1: afraid of them, or something like that. I found one
Speaker 1: article that interviewed the arachnologist Norman I. Platinik, who works
Speaker 1: at the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
Speaker 1: which is probably the coolest place I went this year.
Speaker 1: Um and Platinum speculates that if spiders were to disappear
Speaker 1: from the Earth, it's likely that human beings would face famine.
Speaker 1: He says, without spiders, all of our crops would be
Speaker 1: consumed by these pests, the pests that are primarily controlled
Speaker 1: by spider predation. So it's hard to know for sure
Speaker 1: what would happen in these weird hypothetical scenarios with ecology,
Speaker 1: but I think that's a pretty safe bet to uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, when it comes back to come back
Speaker 1: to black widows for instance, sure you don't want to
Speaker 1: be they become bitten by one, but that black widow
Speaker 1: is there because their insects to eat, so she's doing
Speaker 1: a service. And if you're concerned about their being an
Speaker 1: imbalance here with too many black widows around, then I
Speaker 1: think one possible solution would be just don't knock down
Speaker 1: those dirt daver wasp nests because they in turn prey
Speaker 1: on the spiders are that bring them back to their
Speaker 1: nests anyway for their their brood to emerge from and consume.
Speaker 1: So allow the web of life to work itself exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: and the wasp nous of life to work it I
Speaker 1: must add too, as in accordance with the research that
Speaker 1: I that I was working on for this episode, even
Speaker 1: most black widow spider bites today do not result in death. Like,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be bitten by a black widow,
Speaker 1: but if you get if you get a black widow bite,
Speaker 1: seek medical attention, you will probably be all right. I
Speaker 1: think I read that since nineteen seventy it's been like
Speaker 1: one scent or less of people bitten by black widows
Speaker 1: end up dying. And I think I've also read that
Speaker 1: every night the average person consumes twenty seven black widow
Speaker 1: spiders just in the course of sleeping. The crawl right
Speaker 1: in there. That is a true fact. That's where we
Speaker 1: get essential vitamins and minerals. All right, So, what are
Speaker 1: some other reasons that we should keep the old arachnets around? Well,
Speaker 1: beyond the fact that animals deserve to live for their
Speaker 1: own sake, they are useful to us for plenty of
Speaker 1: other reasons. Spiders have a lot of biommetic technological uses
Speaker 1: that people are learning more and more about all the time.
Speaker 1: One of the things would be their silk, for example. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: we we have to have an older episode that they
Speaker 1: just rolls through all the various ways and reasons that
Speaker 1: we're trying to steal the secret of the silk. And really,
Speaker 1: I mean it goes back to ancient mythology to um,
Speaker 1: was it Arachney who lost the bet? A weaving bet
Speaker 1: with the gods or looming? I guess we're using a loom,
Speaker 1: but at any rate, Uh, Yeah, the silk of the
Speaker 1: spider is an amazing material, a true meta material. Um.
Speaker 1: They have special glands that secrete silk proteins dissolved in
Speaker 1: a water based solution, and the spider pushes the liquid
Speaker 1: solution through long ducts. These ducts leaved him lead to
Speaker 1: microscopic spigots on the spiders spinnerets, spigots. Don't you wish
Speaker 1: you had spigots and and uh and generally there are
Speaker 1: two or three spinner at pairs located at the rear
Speaker 1: of the abdomen. Furthermore, each spigot has a valve that
Speaker 1: controls the thickness and speed of the excruted material. So
Speaker 1: the idea here is that when we're talking about the
Speaker 1: silk of a spider, it's not just that they have
Speaker 1: a little spool of thread in there, or that it's
Speaker 1: just you know, a silly string type situation. There is
Speaker 1: a manipulation of these of these proteins and the there's
Speaker 1: a an actual weaving that takes place. They're forming a
Speaker 1: material and they act The exact form of the material
Speaker 1: will vary depending on what they're using the silk for.
Speaker 1: I mean, even with with one spider individual, they may
Speaker 1: may be producing various versions of the product depending on
Speaker 1: what they needed for. So as the biggts pulled silk
Speaker 1: molecules or spidrons out of the duct out of the
Speaker 1: ducts and extrude them into the air, the molecules are
Speaker 1: stretched out and linked together and they form these long strands,
Speaker 1: and the the spinnerets wind these strands together to form the
Speaker 1: sturdy silk fiber okay um. Most spiders have multiple silk
Speaker 1: glands which secrete different types of silk material optimized for
Speaker 1: those different purposes. So by winding different silk varieties than
Speaker 1: together in varying proportions, spiders can form a wide range
Speaker 1: of fiber materials, and they can also vary fiber consistency
Speaker 1: by adjusting the biggests to form smaller or larger strands.
Speaker 1: So they're they're true marvels. I mean, it's not just
Speaker 1: that the material is great, but just their manipulation of
Speaker 1: it and their creation of it like they are. There's
Speaker 1: just a level of of of engineering and production going
Speaker 1: on with with the spider that you know, most people
Speaker 1: take completely for granted. And of course the silk is
Speaker 1: very interesting. As I mentioned a mintigo to engineers for
Speaker 1: like material science purposes to study this to see, you know,
Speaker 1: can we make something like this at a larger scale
Speaker 1: that would be useful in building our structures and technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's it's like a perfect material. It's it's strong,
Speaker 1: but it's flexible. Um. It's organic in nature, so you
Speaker 1: can use it in various bio medical properties. You can
Speaker 1: use it. There are a lot of potential applications and
Speaker 1: artificial limbs, artificial tissues, artificial tissues, scaffolding. UM. Have also
Speaker 1: read possible for parachuting, like really anywhere you could use
Speaker 1: a really remarkable, strong but flexible material. Uh, spider silk
Speaker 1: has a potential place and spider evolution perfected it and
Speaker 1: we just were biomemetics are just catching up with it,
Speaker 1: you know. I have also read many stories over the
Speaker 1: years about using spider venom for medical purposes. One story
Speaker 1: in particular I remember was about using it to treat
Speaker 1: erectile dysfunction. Is that correct? This is correct? Um? And
Speaker 1: And if anyone's like, oh, spider venom, I mean really,
Speaker 1: when you look at at medicines, the vast spectrum of
Speaker 1: medicines that we we we take from the natural world
Speaker 1: in a large part we're making use of poisons and venoms,
Speaker 1: you know, just figuring out what does this poison or
Speaker 1: venom do, and how can we interact with it at
Speaker 1: the appropriate dosage, of the appropriate level, How can we
Speaker 1: exploit those properties for our benefit. So in this case,
Speaker 1: let's talk to a second about erectile dysfunction. Existing erectile
Speaker 1: dysfunction drugs manipulate valves controlling blood flow into the penis,
Speaker 1: but they don't always work. In fact, they don't work
Speaker 1: on one out of every three men who require any
Speaker 1: D drug. So we send in the spider. Specifically, we
Speaker 1: spend in the Brazilian wandering spider, also known as the
Speaker 1: banana spider. UH. They however, rarely crawl on bananas, which
Speaker 1: you know that will make sense to just a second here.
Speaker 1: So these are five inch or thirteen centimeter arachnids. They
Speaker 1: carry a venom that can cause pain, swelling, increased heart rate,
Speaker 1: and also preappism, which is a condition that affects those
Speaker 1: blood flow valves that already talked about. UH, And this
Speaker 1: results in an erection that can last for more than
Speaker 1: four hours, is usually painful, and may happen without sexual arousal.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about blood potentially coagulating and clotting inside
Speaker 1: of the erection. That's how dire situation is. So obviously
Speaker 1: that's nothing that one wants for oneself, but it's a
Speaker 1: great example. Here's the venom. We see that it's interacting
Speaker 1: with this area. Uh, that is that is vital for
Speaker 1: erectile drug creation. Like, there's a lot of money to
Speaker 1: be made in manipulating those valves, and so a lot
Speaker 1: of research has already gotten into this. The researchers work
Speaker 1: to identify the natural derived chemicals in the venom that
Speaker 1: might be taken advantage up and so far they found
Speaker 1: that p n t X two six is the active
Speaker 1: compound in the wandering spider venom, and it's essentially a
Speaker 1: biological version of viagra. It even appears to have fewer
Speaker 1: side effects than existing E D drugs. Uh. However, to
Speaker 1: conduct a proper trial, you have they have to be
Speaker 1: able to replicate the stuff in large enough quantities. And
Speaker 1: this is a situation we get into with both spider
Speaker 1: venom and with spider silk. Spiders are very difficult to farm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember reading a story years ago about people who
Speaker 1: were weaving a garment out of spider silk. They were
Speaker 1: taking these uh or or weaving spiders at the Madagascar
Speaker 1: or somewhere uh and harvesting their silk in order to
Speaker 1: weave this dress. That that sounds like a crazy project
Speaker 1: to me. I'm not sure if that's well advised, but anyway,
Speaker 1: I think they had to keep capturing and then releasing
Speaker 1: the spiders over and over uh in order to harvest
Speaker 1: their silk, because you can't just keep them, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like a silk warrant worm, where where we
Speaker 1: have a silk producing uh insect that we have that
Speaker 1: we have domesticated and warped over time into just a
Speaker 1: you know, pure silk creating organism. But with spiders, most
Speaker 1: of them are territorial carnivores. They're highly aggressive against anything,
Speaker 1: especially their own kind. There are social spiders that exist,
Speaker 1: and these are actually these are actually pretty interesting. I
Speaker 1: hadn't done a lot of reading about them before that.
Speaker 1: They're not quite use social in the manner of bees
Speaker 1: or ants, not team players, right, they don't have casts
Speaker 1: or anything. They're no work or spiders, etcetera. But they
Speaker 1: do cooperate in the rearing of young and the acquisition
Speaker 1: of food. UH. That that being said, most of the
Speaker 1: spiders that people seem to be looking at to potentially
Speaker 1: farm are not social spiders. Uh So anyway, either way
Speaker 1: you look, you shake it. Though, way too much work
Speaker 1: would go into any attempt to raise spiders uh in
Speaker 1: little individual enclosures, and you would still get only a
Speaker 1: limited amount of spider venom or spider or spider silk
Speaker 1: out of the the the effort. So it sounds like
Speaker 1: you'd want to find another way to produce this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: You want genetically modified spider silk or spider venom, And
Speaker 1: in fact, that's what's led to, for instance, the creation
Speaker 1: of the Blessed Goats spider hybrid, which we've covered on
Speaker 1: this show before. I believe where you let's make a
Speaker 1: let's let's tinker with the genetics, let's create a goat
Speaker 1: that essentially milks uh spider silk. That's the wonders of
Speaker 1: our modern age. So that is where researchers have been
Speaker 1: looking with with the spider venom of our banana spider.
Speaker 1: In two thousand fourteen, researchers successfully created a recombin vaculo
Speaker 1: virus with the p n t X two six gene
Speaker 1: and then they use this to infect a culture of
Speaker 1: caterpillar cells, which produced the spider toxin. However, human trials
Speaker 1: are still years away. But this would be the shape
Speaker 1: of futuristic corrections, just just letting in shaped. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: not spider shaped. Uh though, I get one can't help.
Speaker 1: But you know that you have your sort of sci
Speaker 1: fi horror lights go off when you start hearing about
Speaker 1: about erect out as function drugs that are made from
Speaker 1: from spider venom um. But I think it'll be I
Speaker 1: think it'll be fine. Yeah, I've seen also research about
Speaker 1: using spider venom in uh in anti pain medication, essentially
Speaker 1: in analgesix. So there was a study I found in
Speaker 1: the British Journal of Pharmacology which indicated that quote spider
Speaker 1: venoms are a rich natural source of h in A
Speaker 1: V one point seven inhibitors that might be useful leads
Speaker 1: for the development of novel analg six. So the creation
Speaker 1: of new pain killers out of naturally existing proteins and
Speaker 1: stuff that are found in spider venoms. All right, So
Speaker 1: I guess the take home here is that spiders are
Speaker 1: high level produced. There. Their high level is the earns,
Speaker 1: their high level weavers um. They have a mastery here
Speaker 1: in these crafts that humans are severely lack. All we
Speaker 1: can do is try and steal their secrets. And we're
Speaker 1: still trying to steal their secrets. So we certainly should
Speaker 1: not wipe them out because there's still so much to
Speaker 1: learn from them, of course, and that that's only the
Speaker 1: mercenary appeal to your self interest and in gaining new technologies.
Speaker 1: I want to say for the record again, spiders deserve
Speaker 1: to be here on this earth just like you do.
Speaker 1: But okay, so back to the giant spider. I was
Speaker 1: eaten by a giant spider. Well, what does the word
Speaker 1: giant mean? There? I guess we should determine what we
Speaker 1: have in mind. Now. We could start by looking at
Speaker 1: what are the biggest spiders occurring in nature? I know
Speaker 1: some of you at home are already trembling and hearing
Speaker 1: about this news, but uh, there are a couple of
Speaker 1: ways you could measure this right. One way would be
Speaker 1: by mass. What is the heaviest spider ocurring in nature?
Speaker 1: And I think the answer on that is is pretty solid.
Speaker 1: There there is a pretty much universal agreement that the
Speaker 1: answer is the theraphos of Blondie, commonly known as the
Speaker 1: goliath bird eater. That they might be a bit of
Speaker 1: a misnomer because it doesn't seem like they primarily prey
Speaker 1: on birds. I think this comes from some you know,
Speaker 1: nineteenth century illustrations and stuff like that. But uh, like
Speaker 1: I said, there's no evidence that they regularly eat birds,
Speaker 1: but they might on occasion. The spider can weigh about
Speaker 1: six ounces or a hundred and seventy grams. That's heavy.
Speaker 1: That is the weight of more than three standard sized
Speaker 1: Snickers bars or exactly five fun sized Snickers bars. Hold
Speaker 1: five fun sized Snickers bars in your hand. That's how
Speaker 1: much the spider can weigh. I'm glad we're not eating
Speaker 1: those in our sleep. I've heard I've heard stories that
Speaker 1: you can hear these things walking. They'll walk you their
Speaker 1: footfall balls makes sounds. Uh. Now, of course, they mostly
Speaker 1: prey on other arthropods, but they have been known to
Speaker 1: eat small vertebrate animals every now and then. But there's
Speaker 1: another way you could measure the largest spider, and that
Speaker 1: would be by leg span. Right, what's the biggest what's
Speaker 1: the biggest spider in circumference sort of looking down from above, Well,
Speaker 1: it appears to be the giant huntsman spider with legspan
Speaker 1: of up to twelve inches or thirty centimeters, often described
Speaker 1: as being quote the size of a dinner plate that
Speaker 1: shows up a lot. Yeah, because you know, that's a
Speaker 1: wonderful image, the idea of setting down and here's a
Speaker 1: living spider just spread out across your tinner plate. Well
Speaker 1: it also, yeah, it suggests that it's literally on the
Speaker 1: plate in your home. It's replaced your food somehow, or
Speaker 1: the chef has gone mad and decided it is live
Speaker 1: spiders for tenner um. Now, whe where do you find it?
Speaker 1: You find this particular specimen and warm climates around the world, Asia, Australia,
Speaker 1: South America, Africa. They're pretty fast even with their size.
Speaker 1: They live under a loose bark on trip our bark
Speaker 1: of trees and rocks in crevices under foliage. And they're
Speaker 1: actually a rather social spider um, to go back to
Speaker 1: what I mentioned earlier, and dozens of them will sometimes
Speaker 1: sit together on dead trees or stumps, as opposed to
Speaker 1: the sort of typical predatory, loner vibe of a spider
Speaker 1: where it's like, if I see anybody that even looks
Speaker 1: like me, I'm gonna eat them, even if theyre might mate. Well,
Speaker 1: spiders just know not to pass up a good meal. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So so that's about as big as things get in nature.
Speaker 1: And even those are pretty rare exceptions. These are the
Speaker 1: biggest of the biggest. Obviously, that's not going to do it, right,
Speaker 1: These spiders don't really represent a threat to humans even
Speaker 1: though they're the biggest. So how big should our model
Speaker 1: spider be to match the Roger Corman movie proportions? Well,
Speaker 1: then this we get back to some some previous discussions
Speaker 1: we've had about the morphological limits of giant creatures because
Speaker 1: you end up going up against two things, Right, what
Speaker 1: is technically pop stable from like a mad science this,
Speaker 1: you know, raising giant spiders in his basement, versus like,
Speaker 1: what is the largest thing that is sustainable? That the
Speaker 1: largest thing that is effective in the in the battle
Speaker 1: for survival, because you know, it needs to work. It's
Speaker 1: like a business, right, if it's it needs to it
Speaker 1: needs to be an effect, have an effective economic flow
Speaker 1: to it, otherwise it's not going to survive. And you know,
Speaker 1: one way to look at it this we always we
Speaker 1: always go in this direction. When he's saying, all right,
Speaker 1: how called large, told this animal be well, how large
Speaker 1: are they now? We've already answered that how large have
Speaker 1: they been in the past. There was a time where
Speaker 1: we thought that the largest spider to ever live was
Speaker 1: a prehistoric um Um mega acne with a body length
Speaker 1: of three nine millimeters or a little over a foot.
Speaker 1: But paleontologist eventually figured out that this was a sea scorpion,
Speaker 1: not a spider. And if you the actual fossil spiders
Speaker 1: that we have are pretty disappointing. They're pretty small. So
Speaker 1: we kind of get into the you know, whale territory
Speaker 1: here where we say, well, actually the largest specimens that
Speaker 1: we know of are what we have today. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I mean we've talked about this before. We talked about
Speaker 1: this in our Science of Human Height episode. We had
Speaker 1: a brief digression on on how large insects and spiders
Speaker 1: and stuff like that can get. There seemed to be
Speaker 1: a lot of limits on on the size of these creatures,
Speaker 1: on arthropods with exoskeletons, that their their bodies are just
Speaker 1: not designed to keep getting much bigger like nobodies are
Speaker 1: really and it comes that we often talk about King Kong,
Speaker 1: right like King Kong the Guerrilla as just a giant gorilla,
Speaker 1: his legs would snap because those of a die of
Speaker 1: heat exhaust. Yet, yeah, like that form is not is
Speaker 1: not designed or you know, or did not evolve to
Speaker 1: to to work at greater scales. And the same thing
Speaker 1: is true of insects. Like in an insect level, having
Speaker 1: an exoskeleton is fabulous because you gives you protection. It's
Speaker 1: a lightweight um and then you tend to be rather
Speaker 1: strong creatures too. But but they're working at a different
Speaker 1: scale and when you start start scaling that up, you
Speaker 1: run into problems of Okay, is the instance, a giant
Speaker 1: spider the size of a dump truck or something probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to move. She shilab would probably not
Speaker 1: be able to move if you just just immediately like magically, Honey,
Speaker 1: I shrunk the kids scaled one up to a giant size.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, all right, you're gonna say,
Speaker 1: well what if it just grew over time, Well, you're
Speaker 1: gonna you have to remember that exoskeletons don't grow. Exoskeletons
Speaker 1: have to be shed. You have to multiple Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's like soft shell crabs, et cetera. The thing is,
Speaker 1: if you have a sufficiently large invertebrate. Then okay, it
Speaker 1: has this this this giant exoskeleton, and it's hard and
Speaker 1: it's rough, but somehow it's able to live with this thing.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe it's an immobile giant spider and like villagers
Speaker 1: worship it and bring it, you know, virgins, a drain
Speaker 1: or something. Okay, that's great, But then what happens when
Speaker 1: that giant god spider has to mold. Well, then conceivably
Speaker 1: it might have mold out of its exo skeleton and
Speaker 1: then its body would just collapse and fall apart because
Speaker 1: it didn't have They no longer had an exo skeleton
Speaker 1: supported it's mass. It's just too excessive. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like trying to imagine, um, I don't know. Uh,
Speaker 1: I'm coming up with a horrible exain. Here's here's what
Speaker 1: I tried to think of, like a you know, uh,
Speaker 1: twenty ft wide pumpkin or cantalope or something. It's just
Speaker 1: this is not a sustainable size. I always come back
Speaker 1: to economics. It's like thinking of, all right, what would
Speaker 1: it be I have a great lemonade stand? What have
Speaker 1: I had a lemonade stand that could feed the entire country.
Speaker 1: What if I had a McDonald's restaurant that could that
Speaker 1: could actually feed an entire continent, or in feed they'll
Speaker 1: feed the world. Those are just ridiculous ideas because the
Speaker 1: form can't get people in the door. Yeah, it just
Speaker 1: does not does not work. You're you're talking, You're talking nonsense.
Speaker 1: And it's a more thing like a lemonade stand that feeds,
Speaker 1: that gives lemonade to an entire country, is like a
Speaker 1: spider the size of a building. Right, Okay, so we've
Speaker 1: established why in an environment with our atmospheric pressure and
Speaker 1: Earth gravity and all that kind of stuff, you would
Speaker 1: never see a giant spider. It just wouldn't happen. Now,
Speaker 1: in a weightless environment, genetically modified the giant spiders, I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of potentially Okay, maybe that's not bad.
Speaker 1: But but let's just roll with it. Okay, we're we're
Speaker 1: going to Roger Corman Land. Just pretend we can ignore
Speaker 1: all that stuff and say we do have a spider.
Speaker 1: I don't know the size of a van or how
Speaker 1: big would a spider have to be to prey on
Speaker 1: a human? Uh, depending on you know, it's it's predatory
Speaker 1: strengths on its venom and stuff like that. It probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't even have to be the size of a van, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this and it and also I
Speaker 1: kept running through my mind me and my son watching
Speaker 1: a blackwood a spider on a vacation Arizona, watch it
Speaker 1: try and catch a grasshopper in its web, and thinking
Speaker 1: about those the size comparisons there. I think a large spider,
Speaker 1: like a hunting spider the size of a dog would
Speaker 1: be pretty pretty impressive, but not maybe not so large
Speaker 1: that you would really run into a lot of just
Speaker 1: real severe morphological limits. Okay, kind of like the dog
Speaker 1: costumes you see where the round Halloween where the dog
Speaker 1: is wearing a spider costume. Maybe not a puppy size spider,
Speaker 1: but like a moderate size, too large, dog size spider. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would think so, you know, and if they're especially
Speaker 1: that creature is hunting the humans with stealth as opposed
Speaker 1: to you know, magic web. But then that's the other thing.
Speaker 1: If scaling up the scaling up the web is an
Speaker 1: entirely different kettle of fish. But but yeah, I think
Speaker 1: a dog sized spider would be able to do it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's our lower limit. Let's say, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: we can keep in mind the possibility of of a
Speaker 1: you know, moving ock sized spider or a van sized
Speaker 1: spider that we'll we'll just have those floating in our mind. Okay,
Speaker 1: we won't ask a lot of questions of them, but
Speaker 1: we'll just have them there. All right. Well, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back we will
Speaker 1: discuss how they get you. All right, we're back now, Robert.
Speaker 1: We have to talk about how these spiders catch you.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, there there are so many different species
Speaker 1: of spiders. There's so many different hunting strategies that are
Speaker 1: utilized by spiders. The most familiar is going to be
Speaker 1: the web. But even with the web, there are multiple types,
Speaker 1: so you have just to roll through them real quick.
Speaker 1: You have orb webs, the most common typical spider web.
Speaker 1: You have triangular webs as well. You have funnel spiders
Speaker 1: and then make sheets of silk and then wrap them
Speaker 1: up in to make these funnel shapes. So the funnels
Speaker 1: have one big opening to catch prey, and they also
Speaker 1: have one small opening in the back in case the
Speaker 1: spider and needs to escape, so it's not sticky, but
Speaker 1: the spider can easily move through them. This is its
Speaker 1: home turf, this is its kill room. Okay, so I
Speaker 1: like that idea, Like somebody just wanders into one of
Speaker 1: these and they're like, what the heck is this giant cone?
Speaker 1: I don't know. No, oh goodness, there's a hunting spider
Speaker 1: on the ceiling. And then they got it. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: most common web traps we think of are these flat
Speaker 1: ones that orb webs. But another one is the three
Speaker 1: dimensional traps, right, yeah, yeah, they're take for instance, cobweb spiders,
Speaker 1: so they make small, just random messes of silk string
Speaker 1: that are attached to their surroundings by a long string.
Speaker 1: There are mesh web spiders that make webs that are
Speaker 1: similar to cobweb spiders that they have a little more structure,
Speaker 1: and they're just really found in small, messy webs at
Speaker 1: the tips of vegetation, especially in grassy fields. They can
Speaker 1: also be found under stones and dead leaves. In the
Speaker 1: human scenario, maybe they would show up I don't know,
Speaker 1: in the restrooms of strip clubs, or the or the
Speaker 1: restrooms of of gas stations. I'm thinking just the restroom
Speaker 1: in general. A dirty restroom is a great place to
Speaker 1: find a giant broom stall what is the perfect place
Speaker 1: to get you? Yeah? Um, I love that as the
Speaker 1: tagline for the resulting movie. Here sheet web spiders. They
Speaker 1: make many kinds of webs that are formed out of
Speaker 1: sheets of silk, and the sheets are widely wildly jumbled
Speaker 1: together and they don't have many large gaps. There's also
Speaker 1: an interesting sheet web spider type bowl and doily spiders.
Speaker 1: They make really interesting structures, essentially an inverted dome shaped
Speaker 1: web or bowl suspended over a horizontal sheet web or
Speaker 1: doily spiders hang on the underside of the dome and
Speaker 1: they attack the prey. So we're talking about with some
Speaker 1: rather impressive structures. Now here's what I'm wondering if we
Speaker 1: scaled that up, and again, with all of the reasons
Speaker 1: that would probably never happen in nature, But if we
Speaker 1: just imagine scaling it up, would we would we actually
Speaker 1: stumble into webs? I mean, are the success of webs
Speaker 1: sort of depending on the lack of sensation of insects
Speaker 1: or something? Do you do you kind of have to
Speaker 1: be a little bit dumber than the standard primate in
Speaker 1: order to end up in a spiderweb. Well, I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting to think in terms of the funnel spiders
Speaker 1: that already mentioned in that part of this trick is
Speaker 1: creating an alien environment that the spider has maximum control over.
Speaker 1: So it's how you know, you might be dumb to
Speaker 1: wander in there, but you're not dumb to not know
Speaker 1: your way around this alien Environment's like walking into a
Speaker 1: zenomorph five right, or into you know, a derelict alien
Speaker 1: spaceship and not knowing which way we're to walk and
Speaker 1: what to do. Um that whatever lives there and eats
Speaker 1: there is going to have the advantage. Well, the kill
Speaker 1: room analogy you had is a good one. It's also
Speaker 1: like at the end of Silence of the Lambs when
Speaker 1: when Joe Foster goes into Buffalo Bill's house exactly exactly
Speaker 1: like that and then even more complixate the drop on her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got the drop, but imagine if he also had
Speaker 1: a decoy involved as well. What because there there are
Speaker 1: these spiders known as sly closest spiders and they create
Speaker 1: a double of themselves. They they they essentially craft a
Speaker 1: large spider from leaves, debris, and dead insect parts. Have
Speaker 1: it in the web. Yeah, in this way, you know,
Speaker 1: confuses predators specifically, So if the spider is disturbed, it
Speaker 1: vibrates its body but once so it's primarily defensive technique
Speaker 1: against things that want to eat the spider. But I
Speaker 1: guess that would also be true if you had random
Speaker 1: Jodie Foster's random Clarice starlings wandering into your kill room
Speaker 1: and trying to apprehend you. Well, yes, I mean, Buffalo
Speaker 1: Bill does have to defend himself against Jodie Foster. She
Speaker 1: was there to catch him, and she has a gun.
Speaker 1: But of course the trap stone in there. Do they
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, they get rather complicated, especially when you
Speaker 1: start looking at trap door spiders. Can you imagine this
Speaker 1: on the human scale to scale? Ups wandering along some
Speaker 1: dry ground and suddenly the ground under you shifts. What's happening?
Speaker 1: I know? Yeah, this is perfect, this is um I
Speaker 1: guess to put this in horror movie terms as well,
Speaker 1: this would be like a a Saw movie kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I can't think of anything else recent where anyone's actually
Speaker 1: busting out a trap door. Uh you know, it used
Speaker 1: to be the standard Bond villain thing. But yeah. Trap
Speaker 1: door spiders prey on larger terrestrial anthropods and even occasionally
Speaker 1: on small lizards. They build tube like tunnels in the
Speaker 1: sides of banks, in disturbed areas, along natural insect walkways.
Speaker 1: They dig the tunnel, reinforce it with a mixture of
Speaker 1: earth and saliva, then a layer of silk, and then
Speaker 1: there's a door. So there are two types. There's the
Speaker 1: cork tight door, which is thick and fitted. The other
Speaker 1: is a wafer type door, which is a sheet of
Speaker 1: silk and dirt. Both are silk hinged. So they're really
Speaker 1: creating a rather complex structures here. Now, some species keep
Speaker 1: it simple, others craft branching tunnels with multiple doors. The
Speaker 1: species also differ as to whether the tunnels are simple
Speaker 1: or branching with multiple doors. So I guess it's not
Speaker 1: so much a jigsaw kind of scenario, and that you're
Speaker 1: falling in, but something is in there, uh, in its
Speaker 1: little disguised k ready to jump out and get you.
Speaker 1: That is classic horror movie fodder. That's that's good stuff.
Speaker 1: But also, uh, we should talk about the other types
Speaker 1: of spider predation. Now, of course, all spiders produce silk,
Speaker 1: but not all of them use it to spin structures
Speaker 1: with it. Some of them make I don't know what
Speaker 1: would you even call it, more like a weapon with it.
Speaker 1: So how how about the Bullos spider. Oh yeah, they
Speaker 1: hunt by using a sticky capture blob of silk at
Speaker 1: the end of a line, which scientists called bulas. And
Speaker 1: if you see video of this, they actually spin it
Speaker 1: around like a lasso, like it'll be hanging from a web,
Speaker 1: spinning this line of silk around in the air and
Speaker 1: then snagging them off with it. So, yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: great example. It's using it like a like a grappling
Speaker 1: hook or like like scorpions, Harpoon and Mortal Kombat. Right, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's good. And then on top of that, you have
Speaker 1: net casting spiders as well. When the prey approaches, the
Speaker 1: spider will stretch the net two or three times it's
Speaker 1: relaxed size, and then propel itself onto the prey, entangling
Speaker 1: it with the web. So these would be like the
Speaker 1: kind of like the gladiators with the trident. I guess
Speaker 1: uh in uh in gladiatorial combat. Oh, would they have
Speaker 1: like the net like the fisherman styleators? Right? They got
Speaker 1: a net in a pokeia and in some sometimes there
Speaker 1: are some spiders of this type that have an extra
Speaker 1: technique that they used to help them pick out their prey.
Speaker 1: At night. This is pretty ingenious. So you have a
Speaker 1: particular species of the spiders that, in addition to any
Speaker 1: kind of structure they may have built, they'll also uh
Speaker 1: spray feces on the ground which will dry white, and
Speaker 1: then any dark animal that has to run across it,
Speaker 1: they're gonna stand out. Oh, I still get them. So
Speaker 1: there's so many levels of of not only utilizing traps,
Speaker 1: but really maximizing the environment, creating a keep coming back
Speaker 1: to the kill zone in the kill room example, creating
Speaker 1: a custom eyed environment that they have total mastery of.
Speaker 1: Yet again, it's hard to imagine exactly what this would
Speaker 1: be like scaled up to monster movie size spiders. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it really translates, right, I Mean, it's
Speaker 1: yet another one of those things where sometimes it's hard
Speaker 1: to fit this to our to our weird premise. A
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff seems to work on the small scale.
Speaker 1: Uh Like, I don't know would would would would spring
Speaker 1: the ground with fcs work for for a giant one
Speaker 1: of these things? I mean, I guess we just have
Speaker 1: to stay in the light, right I guess? And you know,
Speaker 1: would a large spider to prey on humans have to
Speaker 1: get even more inventive. Would it actually use its webbing
Speaker 1: and it's decoys to create like an entire, entirely functional
Speaker 1: um rest stop to create a party with free beer.
Speaker 1: It's like, sorry, it's all spider silk. You don't know.
Speaker 1: Do you go to drink it? Yeah? So there are
Speaker 1: lots of methods of spider predation that obviously involves silk
Speaker 1: in one way or another, creating traps and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But there's also the much older, simpler, more universal hunting
Speaker 1: tactic where they just chase you down, Just run you down, bite, bite,
Speaker 1: and subdue. Yeah, maybe jump out from behind a tree
Speaker 1: or something. But so I was wondering about the speed
Speaker 1: of spiders. Try to imagine we've got the scaled up
Speaker 1: spider again, ignoring all the physics constraints, how fast would
Speaker 1: it move if it moved relative to its speed on
Speaker 1: the ground. The answer is hilarious. So, so I wanna
Speaker 1: reference that. There's some papers on spider gate characteristics and
Speaker 1: and running speed among spider species that are like these
Speaker 1: grass funnel web spiders. Hololena is the genus, and research
Speaker 1: has shown that under experimental conditions, a couple of species
Speaker 1: of funnel web spinning spiders and the whole landa genus
Speaker 1: can perform sprints occasionally faster than about fifty centimeters per second,
Speaker 1: which works out to about seventy body lengths per second
Speaker 1: for these spiders. Now, imagine if you could sprint up
Speaker 1: to seventy body lengths per second. If you're six ft tall,
Speaker 1: that's a hundred three cimeters. That means if you could
Speaker 1: move as fast as this spider relative to your own
Speaker 1: body size, you would be able to move a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty eight meters per second. That's about one point
Speaker 1: for American football fields per second. Now, if you imagine
Speaker 1: a predator that could kill you could sprint up to
Speaker 1: seventy body lengths per second. If our giant spider has
Speaker 1: I don't know, a ten meter body length and can
Speaker 1: sprint seventy body lengths per second, that's seven d I
Speaker 1: mean that obviously that's not going to happen in reality,
Speaker 1: but these things would be able to chase you down
Speaker 1: in ways that are unbelievable to the human mind. Oh wow, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to even imagine how that would scale up.
Speaker 1: The best I can do is to try and imagine
Speaker 1: it taking place in like a tensent dragons tiled map
Speaker 1: the grid and even then that's a ridiculous amount of speed.
Speaker 1: Why would you have that many grid squares battlefield that big?
Speaker 1: It's unmanageable. Contact your d m okay, So other fun
Speaker 1: adventures in predation. There is one family of spiders that
Speaker 1: I love, known as the labor a day the Allobrids.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, these guys are great because they they actually
Speaker 1: crush you. And I say you, I'm speaking of course
Speaker 1: to small insects, but they crushed their prey with their webbing.
Speaker 1: They wrap them up and essentially a body crushing iron
Speaker 1: maiden of silk. Yeah, there's a species particularly we've read about,
Speaker 1: the philip Pinella of Assinna And yeah, they have this
Speaker 1: method of wrapping you in silk that is so tight
Speaker 1: that your body structures are crushed. In word, they say
Speaker 1: that the legs snap that like the eyes buckle in.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty ground it. It reminds me of I
Speaker 1: think there's a scene in color Clowns from Outer Space
Speaker 1: where they utilize some sort of silly string contraption that
Speaker 1: works like this. But but yeah, the researchers have apparently
Speaker 1: observed these spiders spending a hundred times as much effort
Speaker 1: over an hour to wrap a prey in eighty meters
Speaker 1: of silk. So that's two d and sixty two feet,
Speaker 1: which seems crazy. Yeah, that that's not scaled to what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. That's just like the tiny spider. Yeah,
Speaker 1: producing that much silk to to wrap the prey this type.
Speaker 1: And actually I've got some more interesting stuff about how
Speaker 1: the species eats in a bit. But so one reason
Speaker 1: they need to do this is because these are actually
Speaker 1: not venom producing spiders, that's right. They don't have the
Speaker 1: powerful bite. So what do they gotta do? What do
Speaker 1: they how do they start softening up their prey to consume.
Speaker 1: They have to drool all over it. But you have
Speaker 1: a strate jacket, tighten it as much as possible, and
Speaker 1: then begin the vomiting. That seems to be the predominant
Speaker 1: theory is that they basically they know they're gonna have
Speaker 1: to drool over this stuff, so they want as small
Speaker 1: a target as possible. It's just go ahead and crunch
Speaker 1: it all up, make something small, so I'm conserving my
Speaker 1: spider drool. Okay, well, let's get more into the details
Speaker 1: of how they drool on you. And uh, that's maybe
Speaker 1: even the nice way of putting it of what would
Speaker 1: happen to you as the eating process actually begins. Now, first,
Speaker 1: I guess we start with you being immobilized. You've been
Speaker 1: caught in a trap by a trapdoor spider, in a web,
Speaker 1: in a in a silk lasso, or you've just been
Speaker 1: chased down and bitten. Uh. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: gonna happen with pretty much all spiders except the labor
Speaker 1: day and another genus known as or not genus another family.
Speaker 1: I think the the hul archad today is that they're
Speaker 1: all gonna have venom. And the venom glands are attached
Speaker 1: to ducts that travel down the length of the collissarae,
Speaker 1: and those are the mouth part structures right like the fangs.
Speaker 1: You are attached to the end of the collissarae. And
Speaker 1: then the ducts come down to a hole at the
Speaker 1: tip of the collissarol fang, and they'll hit you with
Speaker 1: that and rapidly contract their muscles to eject this cocktail
Speaker 1: of venom into you. Now, the venoms vary from species
Speaker 1: to species, and the venom cocktail is generally well, it's
Speaker 1: a cocktail, it's heterogeneous. Right, So it means they contain
Speaker 1: multiple different toxins and different chemicals doing different jobs. So
Speaker 1: a common spider toxin is going to be a neurotoxic polypeptide.
Speaker 1: It's a chain of amino acids that attacks the nervous system. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the prey can expect to experience some distressing systemic
Speaker 1: effects and paralysis. But different spiders are gonna gonna hit
Speaker 1: you with different venoms. There, They're gonna be different things.
Speaker 1: You'd have to expect. We can't. There's no one size
Speaker 1: fits all. But from this stage it's generally going to
Speaker 1: be on to the eating. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back, we will
Speaker 1: be consumed. Alright, we're back. The spiders have captured us,
Speaker 1: and now they're going to consume us. Right, So the
Speaker 1: spider has you immobilized, perhaps wrapped in a cocoon of silk,
Speaker 1: may be subdued with a venomous bite, and the purpose
Speaker 1: of the venom is to subdue and paralyze the prey.
Speaker 1: I've read that the fact that it often kills the
Speaker 1: prey is technically an unnecessary side effect. Plus, we should
Speaker 1: keep in mind that venom is designed to work primarily
Speaker 1: against the spiders major food source, which is arthropods other
Speaker 1: invertebrate insects. So you are not an arthropod unless you are,
Speaker 1: in which case we're preparing Earth for your arrival. But
Speaker 1: when the spider starts to eat you, you a mammal,
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe you'd still
Speaker 1: be alive and paralyzed, you might be dead. It's hard
Speaker 1: to say. It kind of comes down to did this
Speaker 1: thing evolved to prey on humans? How? Atomic radiation? Robert? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's the thing, Like it's a it's a tool
Speaker 1: for a particular particular purpose. And unless you're dealing with
Speaker 1: some other worldly environment where humans and giant spiders have
Speaker 1: co evolved for this relationship, it's gonna be a little uncertain.
Speaker 1: It's to be a little off exactly right. So how
Speaker 1: does it start to eat you? Well, generally spiders consume
Speaker 1: a liquid diet. But I'm not a liquid, Robert, or
Speaker 1: you a liquid I'm mostly liquid. But you know, I
Speaker 1: mean if I were to go and eat you, you
Speaker 1: would not you. I mean, your body has lots of
Speaker 1: liquids in it, incorporated into cell structures, you can have
Speaker 1: a lot of valid stuff. Yeah, So so something's going
Speaker 1: to have to happen here. So what's going to happen
Speaker 1: is that the spider begins to vomit on you. This
Speaker 1: can happen in a couple of different ways, which we'll
Speaker 1: get to in a moment. But the essential processes that
Speaker 1: the spider ejects digestive fluids onto you, and these digestive
Speaker 1: fluids contain enzymes. Uh, the fluids are truly caustic. And
Speaker 1: here's one example to illustrate, which I thought was fascinating
Speaker 1: from a study in the Journal of a Racknology. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna go back to the lubri day. The spiders
Speaker 1: that don't have their own venom glans, right, and they
Speaker 1: crush you with that silk structure. So, uh, this is
Speaker 1: the same species we mentioned earlier, the Filipinella vicinna. They
Speaker 1: usually pose on their web in a strange posture if
Speaker 1: you've ever seen this. They keep their legs folded in
Speaker 1: against the body. And it's been hypothesized that the reason
Speaker 1: they pose in the web like this is to avoid
Speaker 1: visually signaling predators. So there might be a bird that
Speaker 1: wants to eat spiders or something. It knows what a
Speaker 1: spider looks like. But if you don't pose in a
Speaker 1: way that gives away the fact that you're a spider,
Speaker 1: the burden might not recognize you as prey um. But
Speaker 1: when the elaborated begins to eat, it does something strange.
Speaker 1: It gets out of its regular posture and spreads its
Speaker 1: anterior legs or the front legs wide apart. It holds
Speaker 1: them way back. Why does it do that? Well, the
Speaker 1: authors of the study point out that, you know, the
Speaker 1: spider's method of eating this illobred is to rapids prey
Speaker 1: in this ridiculously tight amount of silk, compress it into
Speaker 1: a compact package like a garbage compactor, and then just
Speaker 1: vomit all over the entire thing. So most spiders are
Speaker 1: going to take a slightly different route where they eject
Speaker 1: these digestive enzymes through a small hole in the shell
Speaker 1: of the prey insect or over a small surface at
Speaker 1: a time when they're eating not pivicina. This will just
Speaker 1: slather the entire thing. Essentially, it's making a huge mess.
Speaker 1: So the researchers asks, huh, I wonder if the spider
Speaker 1: it's is holding its anterior legs away from this mess,
Speaker 1: because the same digestive enzymes it's using to dissolve its
Speaker 1: prey would also dissolve its own body, and their research
Speaker 1: found bingo, that does appear to be what's happening. The
Speaker 1: authors found that the spider's digestive enzymes, when applied to
Speaker 1: detached legs from the same spiders species, uh, they caused
Speaker 1: the set a, meaning the bristles, to fall off of
Speaker 1: the legs, and they also cause damage to the intersegment
Speaker 1: mental membranes between the different parts of the legs. So
Speaker 1: imagine if you had to eat by so you've got
Speaker 1: a plate you're sitting down with, you've got a hamburger
Speaker 1: on it, and you have to eat by vomiting Hollywood
Speaker 1: acid all over your food. Yeah uh. And then also
Speaker 1: that stuff would give you chemical burns if you touched
Speaker 1: it with your own hands, so you sort of have
Speaker 1: to like vomit all over and then hold your arms
Speaker 1: back and slurp it up. But anyway, let's get back
Speaker 1: to being the prey. You're not the spider in this scenario.
Speaker 1: You're the prey, so obviously you've been immobilized. The spider
Speaker 1: starts to apply this digestive fluid to you. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: if you've been attacked by a giant uh P vicinna,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be crushed into a tiny ball with a
Speaker 1: tight wrapping of silk, so we can basically say it's
Speaker 1: lights out. Then the spider will dissolve your entire body
Speaker 1: with these enzymes and suck up your liquefying body parts,
Speaker 1: holding its legs back in a very dainty fashion as
Speaker 1: it does so. Um, but well, what's gonna happen if
Speaker 1: it's not this species, if we're dealing with other types
Speaker 1: of spiders, And here a lot of my information is
Speaker 1: going to come from a really delightful arachnology book called
Speaker 1: The Biology of Spiders by rain or Felix. Uh So,
Speaker 1: for most types of spiders, feeding differs significantly based on
Speaker 1: whether or not the spider has what's called calyssral teeth.
Speaker 1: So the spider have the calyscera, you know, these are
Speaker 1: the mouth parts that have the fangs at the end
Speaker 1: of them. But some spiders have have these these teeth structures,
Speaker 1: these sort of grinding surfaces on the inside of them,
Speaker 1: and some have very few of these or don't have
Speaker 1: these structures at all either way, The general processes that
Speaker 1: the spider is going to barf, it's gonna regurgitate some
Speaker 1: digestive fluid onto the prey, wait a few seconds for
Speaker 1: it to dissolve some tissues, and then it's gonna suck
Speaker 1: that liquid back in and then repeat at victori um. Uh.
Speaker 1: So what happens when the spiders don't have these teeth
Speaker 1: I mentioned the calyssol teeth or have a few of them. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are a few families of spiders that are like this.
Speaker 1: So there's the terridda day, the comb footed spiders or
Speaker 1: tangle web spiders, and this is a big family of
Speaker 1: spiders that includes the Latrodectus genus, which are the widows.
Speaker 1: And then also we're gonna include the thomisids with your
Speaker 1: crab spiders. So these guys work typically by creating a
Speaker 1: very tiny hole in the outer shell of the prey,
Speaker 1: which they might poke with the calyscera, and then spitting
Speaker 1: digestive fluid into the body cavity through the holes. That
Speaker 1: makes sense. So you've got an insect with an outer
Speaker 1: exoskeleton and you're gonna be stabbing a hole in the
Speaker 1: outside and then just putting some of this digestive enzyme
Speaker 1: inside through the hole. The process is continued until the
Speaker 1: prey is sort of left as a dry empty shell
Speaker 1: like the digestive enzymes in and then it sucks some
Speaker 1: fluid out. It's kind of reminiscent of some some mummification
Speaker 1: techniques have been employed. Really, you're gonna do about all
Speaker 1: that nasty stuff inside the creature? Well, you can try
Speaker 1: and drain it out, you can try and putrefy it
Speaker 1: or what have you. And this is kind of like that. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: Well you are essentially left with a dried up husk
Speaker 1: of a creature which is mummy like and it's and
Speaker 1: it's outer appearance at least, so in the end, most
Speaker 1: of these interior tissues are going to be dissolved, sucked out,
Speaker 1: and delicious. And to me, I I wonder if so,
Speaker 1: I was left to wonder what a spider that works
Speaker 1: this way would make of an animal with an indoskeleton
Speaker 1: rather than an exo skeleton. So does the exo skeleton
Speaker 1: work as an important type of container for the process,
Speaker 1: if that makes any sense. Would a spider like this
Speaker 1: trying to eat a mammal without an exo skeleton be
Speaker 1: kind of like if we tried to eat a bowl
Speaker 1: of soup without the bowl. Yeah, because it's essentially making
Speaker 1: you into a soup inside your own axis skeleton. Right,
Speaker 1: So I er, I don't know. Mammals might not be
Speaker 1: all that that enticing to spiders like this, but then again,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It could be they may find some
Speaker 1: way around it. I mean they they have by and
Speaker 1: large evolved to prey and eat up eat invertebrates, and
Speaker 1: that's their realm of of influence. Yes, and also we're
Speaker 1: gonna get to the toothy spiders in a second, but
Speaker 1: first I want to hit a myth, Robert. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you thought like this when you were a kid.
Speaker 1: I definitely thought this when I was a kid, and
Speaker 1: I know some people probably do think this, that spiders
Speaker 1: suck the juices out of prey animals through their fangs.
Speaker 1: Did you think this way? Um? I think I did.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much of that was, like directly
Speaker 1: due to science text in school or my or if
Speaker 1: it had to do with something I picked up elsewhere
Speaker 1: and cartoons or something. But vampires, I often think of
Speaker 1: vampires this way, or I used to that they would
Speaker 1: bite you with their fangs, and then it would be sucking,
Speaker 1: not with like the mouth, through the esophagus in the stomach,
Speaker 1: but the blood that they drained from me would be
Speaker 1: going up through the fangs somehow into a blood receiving system. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people think about spiders this way.
Speaker 1: This is not the case. That the presence of venom
Speaker 1: injecting fangs similar to hypodermic needles in a way, I think,
Speaker 1: could be responsible for the mistaken assumption that the fangs
Speaker 1: work both ways. But this is not true. That the fluid,
Speaker 1: so the fangs inject the venom, but the fluids that
Speaker 1: are coming out of the prey animal are coming in
Speaker 1: through the mouth parts. The fangs are injectors. The spiders
Speaker 1: do consume with a fluid sucking action, but this is
Speaker 1: done through a mouth orifice powered by an order by
Speaker 1: the by the pharynx, and by an organ known as
Speaker 1: the sucking stomach. Like that's great, It's like a pump
Speaker 1: that that gets you know, it creates this suction action
Speaker 1: that pulls all that delicious fluid up through the mouth
Speaker 1: parts and through the pharynx down into the digestive system.
Speaker 1: But anyway, back to the spiders that do have the teeth,
Speaker 1: So these are the ones that have these grinding surfaces
Speaker 1: on their calycera. They perform instead a kind of rudimentary
Speaker 1: grinding action with these surfaces. So in science we refer
Speaker 1: to this as a mastication. It's a great word, but
Speaker 1: it just means chewing. Uh. And so these spiders also
Speaker 1: do the same thing. Essentially, they work by regurgitating digestive
Speaker 1: fluids onto the prey that dissolves the prey tissues and
Speaker 1: then slurping up dissolved body tissues. But in the process
Speaker 1: they also use these calyssral teeth to chew and mash
Speaker 1: the prey animal up into a ball of unrecognizable half
Speaker 1: dissolved mush. So they tenderizing and supefying at the same time. Exactly,
Speaker 1: They're they're they're creating bullus the same way you actually
Speaker 1: do with your mouth. You know, they say when you
Speaker 1: chew food in your mouth, you sort of chew into
Speaker 1: a chew chewed up mash. This is really grows it
Speaker 1: chewed up mashed up ball of food known sometimes as
Speaker 1: a bullus, that you then swallow. Yeah. Next, I'm highly
Speaker 1: encourage anyone next time you're eating, because I think about
Speaker 1: this all the time from an episode we did a
Speaker 1: few years back on digestion. But you can, actually, if
Speaker 1: you're conscious of it, you'll find yourself sitting there chewing
Speaker 1: and just feeling as your your mouth automatically liquefies um,
Speaker 1: choose up and then forms all of this into a
Speaker 1: slurry bolus that then goes down the throat. That's yeah, great,
Speaker 1: But but what's it like to be that bolus? That's
Speaker 1: that's what we're wondering today. I guess at this point
Speaker 1: you're probably not aware of what's going on anymore, because
Speaker 1: the mastication process um and the dissolving of the digestive
Speaker 1: enzymes work together to sort of reduce you to an
Speaker 1: unrecognizable ball of gunk. Uh So, you become this mush,
Speaker 1: and then they consume you via the old in and
Speaker 1: out that we discussed before in the end, leaving behind
Speaker 1: only sort of indigestible parts like shells or maybe in
Speaker 1: some rare cases, bones and feathers. Uh So, these spiders
Speaker 1: also have a process for vomiting backup hard in edible
Speaker 1: body parts that are accidentally slurped up along with nutritious
Speaker 1: dissolved meat from the prey, not unlike an owl. Owls
Speaker 1: do that. Owl pellets are an indigestible stuff that they
Speaker 1: went back up vom. Oh. I always thought those came
Speaker 1: out the other end. No, no, no, yeah, these kind
Speaker 1: of these come out the mouth. No, yes, spiders actually
Speaker 1: they produce pellets. This has been shown in research that
Speaker 1: indigestible parts. They so they go down, they go down
Speaker 1: the mouth parts and then they get sort of like
Speaker 1: I believe, they get sort of caught by these uh,
Speaker 1: pharyngeal muscles and by sete again these bristles structures that
Speaker 1: sort of filter them and catch them. Stuff that's not
Speaker 1: good to eat gets sort of bawled up and then
Speaker 1: ejected back out. Interesting, delicious, But of course this brings
Speaker 1: us back to the question though, what about vertebrates? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we are vertebrates. Can we look to examples of spiders
Speaker 1: preying on other vertebrates? If there were a giant spider,
Speaker 1: would it even want to eat us? I mean, would
Speaker 1: it just be looking for like, where are the you know,
Speaker 1: equally sized insects for me to eat? Obviously, the primary
Speaker 1: prey animals of most spiders are going to be other
Speaker 1: arthropod invertebrates, mainly insects, But what happens when the food
Speaker 1: chain runs backwards? Do spiders ever seemed to eat vertebrates
Speaker 1: on purpose, even mammals. Yeah, yeah, this does happen. It
Speaker 1: doesn't happen that often, but it does happen. One example
Speaker 1: I want to look at is a paper by paper
Speaker 1: in Plos one by Martin Knifefeller and Miriam Nornschild, and
Speaker 1: this was called Bat Predation by Spiders. It's about what
Speaker 1: you guess it is from the title. They tried to
Speaker 1: catalog recorded instances of spider predation on bats. Sometimes a
Speaker 1: bat meets an unfortunate and it gets stuck, entangled in
Speaker 1: a spider web. Sometimes after that happens, the spider begins
Speaker 1: to eat. So the author has judged that in many
Speaker 1: of the recorded instances, it looked like what had happened
Speaker 1: when a bat died in a spiderweb was what they
Speaker 1: would call a non predatory death. The bat just got
Speaker 1: caught in there, got exhausted or dehydrated or something, and
Speaker 1: it died, and the spider didn't even bother feeding on it, didn't.
Speaker 1: He probably like he didn't even know what to do
Speaker 1: with it right. In other examples, however, they identified what
Speaker 1: they thought looked like genuine predation where the spider appeared
Speaker 1: to attack, kill, and then eat the captured bat. They
Speaker 1: also point out that these cases of bat predation, where
Speaker 1: it at least seemed to them that the spider was
Speaker 1: genuinely preying on the bat, might inform our judgment of
Speaker 1: a hypothesis, and this is not necessarily known, but it's
Speaker 1: a hypothesis in arachnology, the large rare prey hypothesis. And
Speaker 1: essentially what this suggests is that while most of the
Speaker 1: prey animals that are captured by large orb weaving spiders
Speaker 1: are going to be tied little insects of low nutritional
Speaker 1: value quote, the occasional catch of large, energetically rewarding prey
Speaker 1: may be essential in order to fulfill the reproductive needs
Speaker 1: of large orb weaving spiders. So, according to this hypothesis,
Speaker 1: if it's correct, you've got these spiders that most of
Speaker 1: what they catch is just junk, it's insect garbage. Every
Speaker 1: now and then they hit the jackpot. And when they
Speaker 1: hit the jackpot with a really large insect like a
Speaker 1: cicada or something, or perhaps even a mammal like a
Speaker 1: bat or a frog or some other small vertebrate. They
Speaker 1: get this huge nutritional windfall that allows them to have
Speaker 1: a much greater chance of reproductive success. Is that kind
Speaker 1: of like a criminal of this pulling off a lot
Speaker 1: of petty little jobs, but still has to carry off
Speaker 1: one big heist every so often to sustain things. It's
Speaker 1: like the beginning of the sting, you know, the grifters
Speaker 1: or knocking people over for a few bucks here and
Speaker 1: there by stealing their wallets, until they accidentally steal the
Speaker 1: wallet of a guy who's running money for an illegal casino,
Speaker 1: and they got these thousands of dollars. But of course
Speaker 1: in that scenario, the gangster then comes after them. I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's but this underlies the problem of
Speaker 1: going after larger prey. Do you see through throughout the
Speaker 1: animal kingdom? And that's that, Yeah, the larger prey come
Speaker 1: with greater risk. You gotta extend more, extend more energy,
Speaker 1: possibly risk injuring yourself or even dying at the hands
Speaker 1: of the larger prey that you're going after. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a risk, but that's that's what that's. Great rewards
Speaker 1: come with greater risk, so they do. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: eaten by a giant spider. Okay, so that's what it's
Speaker 1: like to get eaten by a giant spider. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it, and I and I hope you enjoy
Speaker 1: being eaten by a giant spider because they are coming. Yes,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, we this is actually a great opportunity. Uh,
Speaker 1: we just started a thing. We're experimenting with, a thing
Speaker 1: where we're doing Facebook live videos and looking at trailer
Speaker 1: footage from old films. So there might be a possibility
Speaker 1: here with this episode. Oh, this could be great. We
Speaker 1: could look at some some old nineteen fifties Spider Ma trailers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's check in on our Facebook page and see if
Speaker 1: that's happening. Maybe we can make that happen the Friday
Speaker 1: after this airs. I just wanted to clarify I was
Speaker 1: kidding about the spiders coming by the way, I meant
Speaker 1: coming from space. I didn't want to suggest that I
Speaker 1: think that we're there evolving in that direction. And some
Speaker 1: people do listen to this show as they're falling asleep,
Speaker 1: so I would hate for that thought to enter into
Speaker 1: their vulnerable, uh semi dreaming mind and plant any seeds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not here to plant spider seeds in your head.
Speaker 1: That's for the twenty seven spiders that crawl into your
Speaker 1: mouth each night. Yeah, let me retreat and become responsible
Speaker 1: for a moment in my final in my final moments here,
Speaker 1: I want to remind you yet in spiders or your friend,
Speaker 1: they're not your enemy, No reason to fight them. At
Speaker 1: number two, there's never gonna be a giant spider on Earth.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, hey, if you want to learn more
Speaker 1: about this topic or other related topics, heading over to
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