Spiderwords ::: On Spiders by John Urbancik

Spiders: My Brief and Skewed History

by John Urbancik

When I was a kid, I didn’t run into a lot of spiders. Sure, there were daddy longlegs all over the place, but they’re the only ones I remember. No Wolf spider, no Black Widow, no Brown Recluse. Certainly no Funnel-Web.

The first spiders I saw were displayed at the Museum of Natural History and on television.

There were probably movies, a la 1975’s The Giant Spider Invasion or 1958’s Earth vs. the Spider, but I don’t recall seeing these. I’m fairly certain Godzilla saved his son from a giant spider once. I never saw it.

At one time there was a superhero, the Spider, Master of Men! Long before Spider-man. I’m not that old.

It’s hard to look back sometimes. I now see Shelob as Peter Jackson envisioned her, though at 12 I must’ve had my own image. Even Harry Potter has faced giant spiders. In 1990, Steven Spielberg produced (and Frank Marshall directed) Arachnophobia so we would all know what would happen to Jeff Daniels if he had to face this fear.

When I was growing up, mom gave worrying warnings about the dangers of spiders in the park, but I didn’t know. She called them ticks, and they’re really only cousins. I probably only heard of spiders thanks to Stan Lee.

Spiders have been around a lot longer than that, though individually they don’t last so long. Most only live a few years. Some female Tarantulas may reach their twenties. There are male spiders that are born sexually mature because otherwise, they won’t last long enough to mate.

If you hear someone referring to ancient spiders, it’s not their age. Sometimes called primitive spiders, they are common today, known scientifically as Mygalomorphs. Apparently, their fangs move up and down instead of side to side like modern spiders. (There are other differences.) Striking down with fangs, of course, is a great way to impale your prey against the ground. (Sydney’s funnel-web spider, whose venom is extremely toxic to humans, has been known to penetrate human fingernails.)

Spider fossils date back some 380 million years. They were already old when earth entered the Jurassic age, and might’ve developed as long ago as the Devonian period.

Most spiders live in an exoskeleton. Maybe all spiders. This means there’s no opportunity for gradual growth. About once a year, they molt. They grew a new skin underneath the outer shell, extract necessary proteins and minerals from that shell, then split it apart and emerge. Over the course of some hours, the new skin is expanded to its maximum size with the addition of fluids, and then it hardens. Larger spiders can molt ten times before reaching sexual maturity, at which point they’re generally done growing. Some have already molted once before leaving the egg-sac.

They can shed legs, too. If a predator has hold of a spider by the one of its eight legs, it’ll fracture a certain soft zone near the body where the spider can quickly staunch the flow of blood. While the leg is still twitching (a distraction) the seven-legged spider makes its escape. Once a spider’s reached maturity, however, lost legs cannot be re-grown.

Spiders are predators, but that doesn’t mean they can’t sometimes be prey. One common enemy is the wasp. Some wasps will anaesthetize a spider, lay an egg on its body, and seal the spider in its own burrow. The spider is still alive, but paralyzed, when the wasp grub hatches and begins dining. Some wasps are small enough to lay their eggs within spider eggs, so the wasp grub starts its life eating spider embryos.

When I was a kid, spiders were already a few hundred million years old, and there were some forty thousand different species across the earth. I’ve heard that we’re never more than three feet from a spider. Don’t know if it’s true. Don’t know if they count dust mites (more cousins) when they say that. All I know is, at my most tender ages, I simply didn’t know--not until a tarantula crept across Peter Brady’s chest.

Born in New York, and having spent some time in Florida, John Urbancik is now in Sydney, Australia. His first novel was Sins of Blood and Stone, now out of print though Shocklines and Amazon may still have copies. Most recently, he was featured in Delirium's New Dark Voices--also sold out from the publisher, also still available in some places . There is an unconfirmed rumor that his novella Wings of the Butterfly will come out in late 2006. You can find a lot of his photography at www.darkfluidity.com.