With so much box office furor currently over the hybrid Spider-Man, this might be a good time to look at the arachnid half of the superhero, the component that, when inserted into the human, Peter Parker, resulted in fantastic powers. And what more appropriate place is there to look than on the Web?
For example, the Discovery Channel Web site, www.discovery.com/exp/spiders/upclose.html.
There we learn that spiders are differentiated from insects in that they have two — rather than three — body segments and usually eight — rather than six — legs. There’s a nice diagram on the site that points out spider body parts. The front segment, the prosone, contains jaws, fangs, a brain, stomach and eyes — lots of eyes. Spiders’ fangs are used to inject venom to immobilize their prey — flies, mosquitoes and other pests — which is, as Martha Stewart says, “a good thing.”
Each of the eight legs is seven-segmented, with two or three claws at the end, which may be why the cinematic Spidey can attach to and climb walls. One group of spiders is called “jumping spiders” because, rather than catch prey in webs, they stalk it and leap on it. This may account for Spider-Man’s jumping prowess.
The second body segment is the opisthosoma. There reside the gut, heart, reproductive organs and silk glands. The liquid in these glands is drawn out through spinnerets in fine strands of a polymer that is, ounce for ounce, stronger than steel. Another site notes that a strand the thickness of a pencil could stop a 747 in flight. Such strands enable the superhero to swing through city high-rise canyons without ending up flattened on the street below.
While the movie character shoots silk cables out of his wrists, the spinnerets of actual spiders are located at the back end of the opisthosoma. If the movie were truly authentic, “Spider-Man” would have more of the bathroom humor quality of “The New Guy.”
Now that the spider basics are in hand, let us move to the heart of the matter, arachnophobia — fear of spiders.
This pervasive fear (in some surveys, respondents have ranked it a couple of steps scarier than a fear of death) is nowhere better shown than at http//urbanlegends.about.com/library/blspider.htm.
There we find an e-mail originating in August 1999. It begins, “Warning! Spider in the Toilet! Importance: High.” The e-mail goes on to outline the cases of four women who became terribly sick, three fatally, after being bitten by a spider — identified as arachnius gluteus (seemingly, butt spider) — which was hiding in a commode in the washroom of a restaurant at the airport. Later, a man on a flight out of Chicago suffered identical symptoms, though he had not been in the restaurant, a sign that killer spiders were on the loose. The e-mail ends noting, “Please, before you use a public toilet, lift the seat to check for spiders. It can save your life!”
After many a lid was lifted in salute to arachnophobia, word got out that the warning was a hoax. The medical journal cited for the hospital cases doesn’t exist, nor does the author, the restaurant or “Blare” airport. And as though you hadn’t guessed, there’s no such species of spider either.
If further assurance is needed, there’s a link to the University of California, Riverside, Department of Entomology, that further debunks the matter.
Speaking of academia, take a deep breath and go to http//philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/spider/.
There sits a preliminary draft of a scholarly paper written at the same time as the hoax e-mail, August 1999. This work is titled, “How Do Jumping Spiders Catch Up On Their Prey? A Model for Pursuit Behaviour.” It’s by Lyn M. Forster of New Zealand and Malcolm R. Forster of the philosophy department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Who, you might wonder, are the Forsters and why are they nearly a world apart? I, as a philosophy graduate from that selfsame Madison campus wonder, “What has spider jumping got to do with Spinoza or Descartes?”
Neither question is answered in the paper which begins, “To catch a ball thrown into the air, we need to estimate its direction, speed and likely place of `fall to earth’ and to do this we have to keep our eyes on the ball. To catch their prey, jumping spiders are faced with similar tasks and must also keep their eyes on the target. But how does a small arachnid make the necessary decisions? We explore the possibilities.”
Do they ever.
On and on, in words and diagrams, they track the behavior of 30 spiders of the genus trite planiceps that they put on little spinning platforms in tentlike enclosures. They come to some conclusions other than the fact that these experiments really irritate spiders, but I’ll let you have the joy of those discoveries.
Perhaps the most charming spider site is http//homepage.powerup.com.au/(
