14th March: Save a Spider Day

It's Save a Spider Day. Love them or hate them, they are certainly interesting. Here are ten things you might not know about spiders.

1. The word “spider” comes from the Old English word spithra, meaning "spinner". The word “spinster” is from the same root and means “one who spins thread.” While on the subject of words, "cob" is an obsolete word for a spider, which is why dusty old spider webs are called "cobwebs".
2. There are something like 38,000 species of spider. Scientists believe there are probably as many more again which are yet to be discovered. Spiders are found on every continent except Antarctica. Every acre of land probably has about a million spiders living in it, more in the tropics, so a human is never more than ten feet away from a spider. A sobering thought if you hate them. More reassuringly, if you've been told that you will swallow any number of spiders while you are asleep, that isn't true. It's highly unlikely that you'd swallow even one.
3. The biggest spider in the world is goliath spider (Theraphosa blondi). It can grow up to 11 inches wide, and has fangs up to one inch long. The world’s smallest spider is the Patu marplesi. It is so small that 10 of them could fit on the end of a pencil. There are spiders which can run as fast as two feet a second; spiders which live under water in a silken "diving bell" and use their legs to fish for prey; spiders which have evolved to look like bird poo, so birds won't eat them.
4. All spiders produce silk although not all use it to make webs. Spiders have between two and six spinnerets at the back of their abdomen. Each one is like a tiny showerhead with hundreds of holes, all producing liquid silk which hardens on contact with air. Some spiders use it to make nets to catch their prey, others use it as a line for flying through the air. An average spider will spin more than four miles of silk in its lifetime - those that make webs usually spin a new one every day. Why don't they get stuck in their own webs? Two reasons. Web building spiders have claws on the end of their legs to allow them to move around the web, and they also produce an oily substance in their body to stop the web sticking to them.
5. Spider silk is incredibly strong stuff. It's five times stronger than a strand of steel the same thickness. If there was a giant spider which could produce silk as thick as a pencil, it would be strong enough to catch a jumbo jet in flight. Scientists have tried, but so far failed, to replicate the strength of a spider's silk. Scientists in the United States are trying to copy gold orb weaver silk in order to use it for bulletproof vests. In olden times, cobwebs were used as a treatment for bleeding, which, modern scientists have found, made a certain amount of sense because they have vitamin K in them, which does help stop bleeding.
6. Some spiders eat their webs. Some female spiders eat their mates, sometimes while they are still "at it". Sex is a risky business for the male spider, but many of them seem to have embraced their fate. Male red widow spiders will actually place themselves in the female's mouth. If she spits him out, he will keep on crawling back into her mouth until she does eat him. The male redback spider, which is a hundred times smaller than his mate, goes out with a real flourish by somersaulting into the female's mouth to be eaten.
7. Spiders have Blue Blood, because unlike mammals, which use haemoglobin to bind Oxygen, spiders use haemocyanin, a molecule that contains Copper rather than Iron.
8. When a spider moves, it always has four legs touching the ground and four legs off the ground at any given moment.
9. According to legend, the Muslim prophet, Muhammad was once saved by a spider which span a web over the entrance to the cave he was hiding in, thus fooling his enemies into thinking no-one was in there because the web was intact.
10. House spiders are able to climb walls because they have tiny hairs on their feet which can grip the surface. They get stuck in the Bath because the surface is too slippery. Some Toilet paper, a Towel or one of those little spider ladders will allow them to get out and go about their business of eating undesirable insects like carpet moths. Catching a spider and putting it outdoors may seem a convenient way to get rid of them, but if you do that you're probably killing it. If it's indoors, it is probably adapted to live indoors and cannot survive outside.

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