So What is it About Spiders?


They invade our homes, they scuttle, they hide, they are fast and secretive and they kill for a living. We treat them all as though they are equally poisonous. They have a kind of mystic power over us, causing knee-jerk reactions if they are encountered unexpectedly or move too quickly. Something about them can flick an internal switch of fear and I can’t imagine that anyone will ever really know what it is. Perhaps our ancestors were blighted by super- venomous spiders that lurked in the dark recesses of caves.


Perhaps they sneaked in unnoticed, snuggling down with unwary children wrapped in warm hides and grasses, their parents reacting violently, beating the spiders to death and instructing their offspring to do the same. Inherited or acquired, the fear of spiders is firmly lodged in many of us today. When Ian Fleming wrote Amelia into James Bond’s bed, he knew exactly what he was doing.


Even David Attenborough, the grand master of natural history, can be emotionally hijacked by a spider. In Life in the Undergrowth, the 2005 six-part BBC series on animals without backbones, there was a programme on the importance of silk. Fittingly, it was about spiders and their webs. David sat on a small mossy bank in a Malaysian rainforest and poked provocatively at the tough web-lines radiating from a central covered burrow. He was demonstrating the connection between the lines of silk fanning out from the trap door and the spider hidden inside. Its feet, revealed by intimate filming beneath the camouflaged trap door, were placed on several of the tripwires, ready to respond to the vibrations of any small creature ambling across them. After enough twangs from David, the spider flipped its lid and launched itself at the stick to bite what could have been another meal.


The speed of the spider’s response, the eruption of the lid and the sudden rush towards him of a mass of fangs and feet had David recoiling in breathless surprise. Yet he retained his composure, completed the piece to camera with his usual aplomb and may even have sanctioned the use of his response in the finished film, knowing that his own, quite genuine reaction would be the same as that of many, if not most, of his viewers.


The Australian redback spider, a relative of America’s infamous black widow, is considered one of the most poisonous spiders in the world. It is a small, black, shiny spider with a red body-stripe, attractive to look at but deadly. The larger female, even though she is no more than 2–3 cm long, spins an untidy but ingenious web in dark, dry hideaways in and around human dwellings. Outside lavatories, woodsheds, flowerpots and verandas are among her places of choice, and contact with people, particularly their carefree children, is inevitable. Redback females – the all- brown males are not big enough to be any threat to human skin – bite with small-fanged difficulty and yet more than 200 people are injected with their neurotoxins every year. Although a slow death from these bites was once a real threat, the widespread availability of antivenin has made fatalities a thing of the past.


Working for Partridge Films on a series about sex in the natural world, I set out for Brisbane with Tony Allen late in 1989. On our long filming list of creatures preparing for, engaging in or recovering from their animal intimacy was the redback spider. Once our studio was ready and escape-proof, all we needed was the spiders themselves. Geoff Monteith, from the Brisbane Museum, made it sound easy. He directed us to a nearby playground, suggesting we look beneath the little seats on poles that parents used while their children played. If we needed more spiders than we were sure to get there, we were to run a stick round the insides of the piled-up car tyres that acted as a kind of manual bouncy castle for the kids. To our horrified surprise, both suggestions worked.


From under the bottoms of adults not in the least concerned about the proximity of either themselves or their children to potential death, we came away with ten female redbacks and four of their diminutive male partners.


Back in the studio, we gave each female spider its own special film set and waited a few days until they had spun their webs. We then introduced the males. Each went about its sexual imperative like a lamb to the slaughter. One by one they loaded their front palps with sperm and set off into a female web, twanging a coded rhythm on the silken strands to suppress her cannibal instincts. Creeping closer and closer, hesitating when she moved but driven by the powerful instinct to reproduce, they crawled between her legs until their loaded palps made contact with her receptive body. And then for the quick getaway before she stirred from her sexually-induced trance and turned hunter rather than hunted. Too late.


A sudden long-legged embrace, a deadly bite and it was all over. One by one, the four little males were done for, wrapped and stored, ready to be sucked dry at a more convenient time. For each deceased male the life-job was done. But all was not lost. If being eaten had given the female the resources to make more eggs to be fertilized by his now safely-stored sperm, then there would be even more young redback spiders setting out into the playgrounds of Australia with his genes in their own little bodies.


My own father used to tell a story about how he once found me, aged three or four, sitting screaming on the edge of our lawn. To trace the problem to its source, he followed my outstretched arm to the end of an accusing finger and there, just in front of me, sitting on a leaf, was a spider a millimeter in diameter. It was a money spider, one of those arachnids which, if treated with respect, is said to bestow the hope of financial reward. What this means, and it was obviously something I still had to learn, is that a fear of some spiders can be suppressed, particularly by greed. Money spiders fail to promote fear in the hearts and minds of grown-ups and this is something that can be communicated easily to children, despite those terrifying first encounters.


At the opposite end of the spider spectrum is the outsized Nephila. You might need to be guaranteed a lottery win to overcome a distaste for one of these giants, even though, just like money spiders, they are quite harmless to people. They live in the tropics where the colourful females, whose bodies may be fully 5 cm long with a leg span three times that size, spin the largest individual webs of all known spiders. The comforting thing is that a web, however intimidating it may be to look at, anchors a spider to a fixed position and can usually be avoided. But Nephila’s web really is intimidating. Its support-lines may be 10 or 15 metres long, running from the tops of trees and lampposts to the ground. The actual web, the trap, can be several metres in diameter, its individual strands tough enough to hold a small bird flying into them at high speed.


My first close encounter with one of these sticky frameworks was in Australia, when I first ventured into the wilds of the Kimberleys, in the northwest of the country, in 1968. That day in April showed more than any other my lack of experience in the tropics. With my attention focussed on something in the distance, I walked straight into one of these giant cobwebs and stuck fast. The harder I struggled, the more entangled I seemed to become. I just knew that, with a web that size, there must be a giant man-eater lurking nearby. But she remained hidden, for good reason, and I pulled myself free without mishap. I had learnt a lesson about concentrating on my immediate surroundings in a new and potentially hostile land.


B E


TRAVEL


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