Spinnerets World - Part I - Spiders

Come quick!!! What's black, all hairy, with ugly eyes, and has turquoise blue on it? Grandpa it's an emergency!!

That was the hysterical voice of my oldest granddaughter when she encountered a spider that had managed to get inside my bedroom door off the veranda. We still don't know the name of that spider, but it was ugly and scary enough that Grandpa picked it up with a paper napkin and flushed it down the toilet.

"Now there's something to think about every time you sit on the throne," was my thought of his strange behavior.

Normally, he'd be chasing us around with the spider or at least escorting it outside. Even he thought the spider too scary and ugly to live. Perhaps it was because it was on his side of the bed just inches away from him.

We have a lot of spiders here in Florida. A lot of people are scared of spiders, and I have to admit I'm not crazy about having one on me or in my bed. Accidentally running into a spider web also upsets me. Yet, when I stop and think about how the wondrous mysteries of the lowly spider -- I cannot help but be captivated by their natural beauty. Spiders are truly sources of inspiration and wonder.

What has the spider world to show in comparison with the petty villainies of the scorpions?

Spiders have their poison, though not a sting. They are as voracious, in their way, as the scorpions in theirs. However though they come boldly into our daily lives, they do not inspire the fear among people in general which undying tradition has created in connection with their stinging scorpion cousins.

Really we ought to approach the spider with more of marveling than repulsion. They were among the world's first astronauts, first builders, first engineers, first spinners and weavers. How they originally succeeded in converting food into a natural glue which on entering the air instantly becomes silk, we perhaps will never find out.

However there it is. A man of the wilds faced by a wide, steep chasm is defeated unless he can climb like a goat. Even goats cannot scale precipices. A spider is our master in that matter.

He cocks up his spinnerets and squeezes out a number of tiny jets of material looking to the eye like a dark-colored gum from a mistletoe berry.

As they emerge, the jets unite into one splendid strand of sil, stronger, in proportion to size and weight, than the finest steel ever compounded.

The strand grows and grows under the effort of the spider. It floats off into the air and has its gummy end caught on a distant projection. Across this tight rope, this natural bridge, spun from its own body, the spider proceeds in triumph to the conquest of a new world.

Age Old Mysteries of Baby Spiders And Their Long Fast

That is the magic of the adult. The baby spider has a feat at command not less astonishing. In some species the mother attends to her eggs and to her babies when they are born, and carries the little things about with her.

They ride on her back, guarded, transported, snugly housed. However, she never ever feeds them!

They reside on her body, fasting week after week for seven or eight months, without one particle of food or one drop of moisture.

How do they sustain life, strength, and growth under such extraordinary hardships? The active sport and ply in which they seem to indulge consume energy. Their growth demands more. Yet, they take in no fuel to replenish their engines of life.

Here is a mystery that is unsolved to this day. However the time comes when their cycle of baby life is run out. Their call comes to quit the mother. She lets them go without regret, as a hen beats aways the chicks which she has cherished for a month or more. The mother spider would eat them if they tarried longer.

Their guardian angel now becomes a consuming dragon to the little spiders. They fly from her, not actually, but in such a manner as to suggest the comparison.

They climb to the nearest height, spin out their little webs as the chasm-crosser spins his.

The silk floats out far from the unfed little bodies, and as the wind catches and hauls it into the air the spiders, securely attached to it, rise with it, soar and flat away -- astronauts without spaceships, living balloons.

That all spiders spin and all have poison is a safe rule. Yet, there are spider-like creatures in the deep seas, and in the shallow waters near the coast, which, if they are poisonous, certainly do not spin. A silk web would be of no use in such turbulent wastes, it would seem. However are they spiders?

The class which we are now considering are technically known as the Pycnogonida and are not true spiders.

They posses one pair of limbs in excess of the number proper to spiders. The extra pair is devoted, in the male, to carrying the eggs laid by the female. This class ranges from our own coasts through the seas and all depths. Various species variously colored.

Some are scarlet. Some match the corals. Some are green in accordance with seaweeds. Some are transparent. Some that live in the deep sea are of a deep purplish red. Some have the gift of swimming. Others merely crawl, down in the depths, where the weight of water is such as to crush man-made inventions and to reduce vessels of glass to finest powder.

One sea-spider, however, does spin. This is a member of the family of spiders which cover our country hedges with web.

The sea species is called Aglena desis. It is a master builder of the ocean, making its home in crevices of rocks and coral reefs. At low tide it runs out into the open to feast on small crustacea, and some say, tiny fish.

With the return of the tide it retreats to its home and walls itself up with silk. It shuts out the sea with a doorway of massed gossamer.

It can defy the sea whose advances mocked Canute, and when the ocean ebbs afresh it lowers its flimsy portcullis and browsers again in its little jungle on the rocks.

Another spider lives in fresh-water pools in Europe. This one is the creator of the diving bell. Something similar, in steel and iron, man learned to employ for our submarine engineering. However air and silk are the only materials here.

Anchoring itself by a strand of silk to a water plant, the spider marches down the stem and spins a tent of silk beneath the surface.

Then it climbs up, turns the hinder end of its bristly little body into the air and collects a bubble of air in it. Then it dives with the bubble imprisoned between the bristles and its legs, and releases the life-giving supply in its tent.

The little home swells, and there is air within it. There the spider sleeps and lays her eggs, rears her babies, and lives the life of an enchanted princess in a fairy cave in the crystal depths.

Still keeping to the water, there are spiders which make boats and sail, apparently in search of food, although the "boats" may be rather accidental and the spider may have no definite idea in mind.

They weave a silken chain to bind together little leaves into a raft-like boat. On this they sail, to plunge every now and then into the water, or rather to walk on it.

Water has a film on its surface. Let those who doubt it watch a Raft Spider running over it, secure as a man on a ski crossing a snowfield.

Let us turn again, however, to the spinners proper of the spider world and pause before the great Garden Spider.

Its web is not to be surpassed by any wonder of the tropical spiders. It is made in about an hour.

At the beginning of it, the spider is a harmless little vagabond. At the end of it she has an estate hung up in the air, a home, a fortress, a snare for the unwary.

It is all fabricated from her own small body. Of course, she may not rush straight through her task, but may dawdle daily and then go to work again. However, give her one open space,with suitable anchorage, and she can achieve a feat of natural magic.

The first necessity is to fix the beams of her chamber. She may either allow a strand to be blown so that its end may catch a convenient point and form a line. or, she may fix an end herself, then drop or crawl down, trailing out silk behind her, till she has reached the point she desires.

Here she makes a little dab with the hinder end of the body, and so fixes the thread to where she would have it. She makes, first, two beams roughly parallel, in this way. then she connects her parallels, and the scaffold of the circular net is in place.

Next, she has to form the radial lines, which all passing through the center, are like the spokes of a wheel. She builds up the hub as she goes, for we can see her continually adding and strengthening there, putting in a new silk and eating up the earlier deposit, or adding fresh material to that already in position.

As she builds she makes her structure her pathway. Having spun one thread, she walks along it to connect the next, and fastens each to the outer beams with a dab of salt.

There may be eighteen, twenty or more of these, but they are all quite smooth, not sticky. Then she begins to form the spiral, the great central section of the snare.

The building of this is a splendid example of speed, method, and prudent care. She walks around and around the skeleton web, across the threads, producing web as she goes, and at each spoke, before attaching the new strand, she gives it a tug with a claw.

The little line stretches, and when it is at its extreme tension she applies it to the spoke, and seems to seal it there with a touch of the spinnerets.

Then she is off to the next spoke. The first two or three turns around the growing web simply furnish extra support for the structure, and they, too, are free from stickiness. Now, however, she pours out web which is decidedly sticky, and may remove the smooth spiral.

The sticky substance is pulled out from the spinnerets, and it seems as through the exact amount necessary to reach from one spoke to the next is withdrawn each pull for tightening, always in an exact join when she applies the line to a spoke.