January 28, 2014 • 34 mins
It's a Trap: Humans aren't alone in their ability to craft a clever trap out of their surroundings. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie look to the insect and arachnid world for deadly examples.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wanting to stuff to about your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
were you able to make it to work today without
finding yourself trapped and snared or otherwise captured by some
(00:23):
sort of large arachnet or insect barely bare sort of
like metal arachnets traffic? Yeah, yeah, I took the train,
so I had to deal with actual giant arachnets in
the subway tunnels. But but generally, I mean, you know,
they're just going about their business. All they want to
do is protect their young and lay more if they're young,
(00:43):
inside your belly. And can you blame them? I know,
I mean it's especially on a cold day like this,
that's the warmest place to delay them your your brood
of eggs. Yes, seventeen degrees in the south here, all right.
So what we're talking about, if you guys are picking
up what we're putting down here, are traps, Yes, because
you know, as humans were pretty good tool users, we
(01:04):
create traps all the time. But out there in nature
there's stuff going on. Yeah, I mean, human traps are
almost limitless. I mean, you can start with the really
basic stuff, like you just take a like a tiger pit.
You know, here's a pit, cover it with some some brush.
After I've dug it out, something walks across the top,
it falls in. Now I've caught myself a tiger or
a person or what have you. There's a and then
(01:27):
if you want to up the anti, maybe you have
a sticks at the bottom of it, a sharpened stick
so that someone falls in, then they're going to potentially
be impaled upon those sticks. You have simple animal traps.
Have you ever used one of these, like to catch
wild animals or cats for Spade in the Neutering No,
we we My wife and I did a little of
that at our previous house. And it's, uh, it's it's
(01:49):
pretty wild stuff because you'll catch multiple things. We were
trying to At one point we were trying to catch
a dog that like a puppy that was in the
neighborhood and it was, you know, sweet little dog but
clearly had no owner, was eating garbage and we gotta
catch this dog. We can, we can do some good
for this dock. But ultimately that dog was too wary. Instead,
we caught like three different possums. We caught two different
(02:10):
stray cats, and that eventually led into doing some spandar
during with those guys, and then we caught our own
cat twice. Was this just a day of like catching things?
Was just like, hey, we're gonna go out and we've
got this trap. You know, just set it up in
the night, you catch a possums, set it up in
the day, you catch your own cat, that kind of thing. Yeah,
and then then ideally that I think the county would
(02:31):
come and take it away. But but yeah, that's a
fun little trap. But then there are there are far
less fun traps that we've devised. Of course, when you
get into the world of land mines, we create explosive devices,
uh that that that you know triggered one one steps
on them or when you know, some proximity mind of
some kind, and and those are of course, uh, pretty
deadly and pretty horrible inventions. But throughout all of this
(02:54):
we we tend to think, well, hey, that's humans were
tool users. We make things, We make things that react
to the presence of others. We create all of these, uh,
these traps. Be it's something rather simple like a little
box of a twig or or something advanced like a landmine.
We're wildy, we're clever. Yeah, there couldn't be any other
(03:14):
animal or insect or arachnid out there that could be
as clever as us. Uh, that is not true. We're wrong. Yeah,
And specifically in this podcast, we're going to talk about
arachnids and insects creatures that we can't We generally just
think there's no way that these guys are up to
anything on the level of human beings. And you know,
I couldn't help but think of Charlotte's Web when we
(03:35):
were looking at this material. Because spiders obviously are featured
pretty well in this area of trapping things, we tend
to think about them as these passive trappers. But I
was thinking about Charlotte A cavodica in in Charlotte's Web,
and how when Wilburt figures out that she's like basically
sucking the blood out of these insects, He's just recoils
(03:57):
and Horror doesn't necessarily want to be friends with her,
and then she kind of lays it down for him, like, look,
this is how I survive. You get things brought to
you in a piale you, you lucky pig. I I
have to use my wits, and I come from generations
and generations of trappers. Yeah, and I don't think a
pig has a lot of room to judge a spider really.
(04:17):
I mean, pigs are not above doing a little killing
for their their food. Well, sure, but in this instance,
and particularly in this story, it was it was this
great moment where it's like, you know, you can't necessarily
judge another person, animal insect for the behavior because they're
just doing what survival needs them to do. And so
(04:40):
that is what I think is so interesting about spiders
and their traps, because it's fascinating these these webs that
they create, and as you have pointed out in an
earlier conversation with me, sometimes they don't even have a web. Yeah,
that's one thing about spiders. I mean, Cope, we have
to go to spiders first, because they are They're the
animal you think of when you think of an a
will laying a trap. I mean, the spiderweb itself is
(05:02):
kind of a metaphor for any kind of a trap
or enscarement, or some sort of complex system of ensnaring
someone or something. But yeah, a lot of a lot
of spiders are don't actually spin webs, so they don't
use their silk and hunting at all. They're just using
them as building materials um or you know, to create
a nursery. Or they're using them as a drag line.
It's sort of, you know, a mountain climbing a line
(05:24):
to use in the navigating their environment. But then there
are a number of spiders that do use their web,
and we we generally, we generally go to the orb
web spiders first because that's the more um iconic spider web,
that big orb shaped web. Flies fly into them and uh,
and then the spider comes and and creeps across the
(05:45):
web and fix them off and and generally that's our
When we think of giant spiders in fantasy and sci fi,
they tend to be a giant orb spider. But that's
just one of the many different ways that different species
of spiders use their webs, generally in some sort of
hunting or trapping scenario. Yeah, and this is from the
(06:06):
article how Spiders Worked by Tom Harris. I thought this
was such a great description of spiders. He says, spiders
are predators above all else, so hunting and killing is
where they really shine in the bug world. Spiders are
fairly fearsome animals. They're the tiny equivalent of wolves, lions,
or sharks. Yeah, they're basically second only to the wasp
(06:26):
because the wasp is just gonna rule over the spider
every time. It's true. And we recently were talking about
how if you could just somehow, through the power of alchemy,
I don't know, uh, miniaturize us humans. I would have
to say that if we if right now, if I
were just about, you know, a fourth of an inch tall,
if a spider was coming at me, this would be
(06:47):
the thing that I dreaded the most, more than a
cockroach or really anything else. Yeah, I mean the spiders
would be fighting over you. It's the thing. Yeah, in
that sense, you have a certain amount of power. You'd
be like you'd be like the wife of Ulysses, where
you have all the suitors coming for you, right and
you get to you get to make ridiculous demands of
your various spider suitors, which one will get to devour you.
And still I would not take it as a compliment.
(07:11):
Let's do a quick anatomy of a web, because, as
you say, you know or spiderweb classic here. Um, if
you look at how a spider constructs a web, it
all begins with silk line that is cast out into
the wind. And when the spider census it's caught upon something,
it will sense a starting point and use that connection
(07:31):
as a bridge. And this is really cool. Um. You
can actually see how this works in an article called
how spiders Work. And when that spider crosses that bridge,
it actually drops another loose thread and it climbs down
on this thread and creates a kind of y configuration.
And from here on out it will start to create these, um,
(07:53):
you don't know, I guess you could call them anchor points,
and you have the sort of V configuration, and then
it starts to lay out these radius points from the
center of the web to the thread. So now you
have these non sticky auxiliary spirals that it creates. And
the reason why it creates these non sticky parsons because
that's the part that it's going to actually travel on
(08:14):
the web, and then it creates another spiral that is sticky.
So it's amazing to me is that it's created this
complex web, but it has also given itself a pathway
on which to to tread. It Yeah, it's it's really fascinating.
One of the things that's top and overlooked is that indeed,
not all spider web is sticky, and they're in some
of these structures that we're going to discuss, some of
these traps and uh and web environments that are not
(08:38):
even sticky at all. So um so, yeah, the orb
orb web spider, the orb webs, the big iconic web.
But then there are a number of other ones we're
gonna go through. Some of these, uh, some bear more
mentioned than others. For instance, triangle spiders make triangular webs,
and these are essentially like imagine the orb web, and
imagine if you cut a pizza sized uh slice of
(08:59):
that web, that would essentially be a triangle whip. Otherwise,
it's basically the same idea, just on a smaller scale.
Now where it starts getting a little more interesting to
get into the world of funnel spiders. Now, funnel spiders
they make a sheet of silk and then they wrap
them up and they to make this funnel, you know,
just like taking a newspaper and rolling it up right, uh.
And the funnels have a big opening on one end,
(09:20):
and that's so where they catch the prey. And they
also have a small opening in the back and that's
the escape hatch in case the spider needs to run
for it. Okay, and it's not sticky, but the idea
here is that the spiders can move around really easily
in this uh, this funnel environment. They've basically made a
you know, home turf killing room where they have a
(09:41):
maximum ownership over their prey. So that in itself is
pretty pretty amazing. It's not not exactly a trap, but
it's a It's they've created an environment that they have
just absolute control over and uh and and an outsider
is going going to be an outsider in that that
web of death. And I like thinking about it in
that way because it moves this idea from spiders is
(10:03):
creating these passive traps to really being tool users and
really premeditating the kills that they exact. Yeah, it's like
if a like if a serial killer was that was
the kind of would bring somebody back to his or
her apartment, and they knew exactly where they had the uh,
you know, their murder weapon stashed, where they had the
various instruments, where the escape routes were going to be. Again,
(10:26):
a complete home turf advantage, and that's what the funnel
spider creates here. Now, another thing is that a lot
of these webs will have a kind of anchor thread,
and this anchor thread sometimes is used to get on
and off of that spider web, but in most cases
it actually used is used as a kind of um
trip wire. And it's so sensitive and the spider can
(10:49):
tell so much from the movement that it can actually
know if it's a leaf that's hit it, or if
it's just the wind, or if it is indeed the
vibrations from an insect. Yeah, So they wouldn't fooled to, say,
by a child's finger poking in or something. Yeah, probably not.
They would probably know pretty soon that they were about
to be scooped up, put under a magnifying glass and
then set on fire. Now, a number of different spiders
(11:11):
these webs that are far less complex their cobweb spiders,
you know, and then everyone knows what a cobweb is.
It's just a small random mess of silk strings. Just
throw it together and see what gets caught in it. Right.
Mesh web spiders very similar. You'll find often find these
in grassy fields, under stones and dead leaves. Uh. Their
sheet web spiders that basically make webs that are formed
(11:32):
out of the different sheets of the silk and there's
just sort of jumbled together and not a lot of
large gaps to be found there though. One interesting type
of sheet web spiders are the bowl and doily spiders. Now,
what the spider does in this situation is it makes
an inverted dome shaped web, kind of like a you know,
like a bowl, all right, and that's suspended above a
(11:55):
horizontal sheet web, and that's the that's the doily, and
the spider hangs from the underside of the dome and
attacks prey. So you have to look at pictures of
that one, because it's a pretty pretty phenomenal looking web.
It just looks like some sort of crazy space structure.
And I like that there's a doily like a nod
to your grandmother's coffee table drink on top of it.
(12:15):
Um that reminds me of something called a net casting spider.
And this can be found across the world in tropical
and subtropical regions, and it's also known as the ogre
faced spider because of its distinctive really big eyes and
that helps them to see prey during the nighttime. But
what's notable about this is that they build cobweb sacks
that are held open with their front legs and they
(12:36):
have an anchor threat on it. Okay, and there's that
anchor thread that acts as a trip wire. And the
really cool thing is that when this spider sensus a vibration,
it will drop that net that it's holding with its
leg over the insect and a thousands of a second.
It's good. It's amazing. There's some really cool footage of
(12:58):
this on BBC. But it kind of reminds me of
like a character out of a mob movie. It's just
like throwing a hood over, you know, unpecting person and
drag them off and hit them with a bag of oranges. Now,
another that type of spider that does something just really
amazing with its web are the the Ceclosu spiders. And
(13:19):
these these guys they make a they make a more
or a standard web and and so you know, you're
not really impressed by that, but they make a decoy
of themselves in the web. They craft this out of leaves,
bits of dead insects, you know, the normal type of
craft that a spider is gonna find and in some
of these cases it even has the correct number of legs,
(13:42):
like it will even have eight legs on it. So
what they've created here is the decoy to confuse predators,
and if the spider is disturbed, it vibrates the web.
It vibrates its body, which vibrates the web, which causes
the decoy to vibrate and look even more lifelike. So
in other words, if it senses that there's a predator round,
it'll start to say, it'll start to shake it. Yeah,
(14:03):
the decoin be like, hey, I'm over here, I'm over here.
And in most times these decoys are much larger than
the spider itself. Yeah, so it can easily hyeah. That's
the other thing. It's a much larger spiders, a scarier
vision of the spider than it's than it actually creates itself.
But the amazing part of that, I mean, just stop
for second to think about this. This is interacted, lowly iracted,
(14:25):
and it has created uh an artistic interpretation of itself. Essentially,
That's what I was sitting here thinking that it has
the ability to understand what it looks like. And presumably
it's not sitting around with a mirror, you know, looking
inside the mirror, maybe a giant water droplet and looking
at the reflection. But in some way it can figure
out the dimensions of itself and recreate them. You know.
(14:47):
It brings to mind that that episode we did on
the Cracking and where we discuss the controversial theory that
these there is some prehistoric um cephalopods that would take
prehistorics sea creatures and crunch their bodies and create basically
a work of art that resembles themselves, which if you
(15:08):
if you just look at it that way, then yes,
it's mind blowing but also a little potentially a little crazy.
But the but the idea that that this particular squid,
this prehistoric squid might have been making a decoy of
itself out of the bodies of its victims, well that
is a little more in keeping with what we're seeing
here with the spiders. So I'm not saying it makes me,
you know, fall behind that cracking theory, but I feel
(15:30):
like it gives it a little more, a little more beef.
So yeah, I mean that that's a spider as an artist,
but what about as an architect, as an engineer? Ah? Yes,
And in this we get into the world of the
trap door spiders. These guys really up the anti here
because what they are doing is they're they're kind of
like taking the the idea of the you know, the
(15:51):
funnel web, but they're they're they're taking it to the
next level. So trapdoor spiders are essentially large spiders that
are close relatives of tarantulas. And they build these two
black tunnels in the side of of of a bank. Okay, uh.
They dig the tunnel, then they reinforce it with a
mixture of earth and saliva, and then they add a
layer of silk on top of that. So it's not
(16:13):
just I dug a hole and I'm gonna hide in it. No,
They've crafted a hole. This is like the kind of
tunnel of you know, you would hear about in the
Great Escape, where there's all this like structuring behind it. Right,
they've smoothed out the tunnel. And the reason for this
is that because eventually this tunnel could be used for
bringing up some young uns right right, and and just
ease of movement through it. They again, it's kind of
like the idea of the funnel. They won't have maximum
(16:34):
control over this environment, maximum maneuverability within it. So they
have this uh, this this hole, this fancy tunnel on
the side of this bank. But then they add the
final touch, and the final touch is they add a
trap door. Now there are two types. There's like a
court type trap door, which is thick and it's fitted,
and then there's this wafer type door, which is basically
(16:55):
just a sheet of silk and dirt. But either way,
they're both hinged like a like a really elaborate web hinge. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, it's amazing just to think that they could
fit the trap door in there, and by the way
that that one that's fit has a beveled edge, actually
fits in there. But it's that hinge that makes it
so amazing. And that's when you sit there and say,
(17:17):
how could you say this is not a tool user. Yeah,
you know, they've used granted they've used something that's come
out of their own body, but they combine that with
elements of the world around them to create this totally
artificial environment. Yeah. I mean, they've created this hatch that
they can surprise prey with because they feel the vibrations
of that prey coming along and then say ha ha,
(17:38):
here I am snatch you and I'm gonna take you
down into my tunnel, and maybe there's even some little
children here that would like to eat. Yeah, and then
sometimes it depends on this the exact species, but sometimes
they are there are branching corridors in the tunnel. Sometimes
they are multiple trap doors. It's essentially they build a
hobbit hole. It's like if if if you had a
hobbit hole, and then if you got too close to
(17:58):
the door, Froda would jump out and drag you inside
and suck all your blood out. Why is that terrifying?
I mean, Froda is not typically terrifying, but why in
that context, just because he's up to no good? He's sneaky,
you know. Yeah, I feel like there's some sort of
distent memory from Sin City that has melded with that
to sor Yeah, well, he's always playing creepy rolls these days.
He's in that remix of Maniac. I think it is
(18:20):
all right. Well, let's take a quick break and when
we get back, we will continue just to to take
out this house reports in the form of insects and traps.
We're back, Robert, did you know that there is a
(18:42):
terrible creature roaming the hundred Agar Woods. This is where
the backs and fell backs. And yes, that's where Winnie
the Pool lives, along with his friends and Christopher Robbins
and some mythical creature they made up called the Backs.
And I don't remember the facts. I remember the jagular Jack.
You are, yes. And of course all these plots I
(19:02):
have discovered, um, you know, reading these to my child
and watching the movies. It's all based on miscommunication, isn't
it comedy of errors? It's very shakespeareance. But in this instance,
the backson is a misreading of a note that says
back soon. Uh. You know, all the characters from the
hundred Acre Woods think that Christopher Robbins has been taken
by this backs, And so they create a pit, of
(19:26):
course classic, and they cover the pit with a picnic blanket.
They anchor it with stones, and they put an empty
honey jar in the middle. Oh, I see where this
is going, all to trap the Bacs in. But of
course what happens. We need to poose the backs and
all along. No, we need the Pooh, being a bear
of very little brains eat great huge heart, knows that
(19:51):
that honey pot is empty, and yet he still falls
for it. He still sees it and he goes for it. Anyway.
The point is traps abound everywhere. Children's imaginations, arachnids, and
in something called ant lions. Yes, the ant lion has
long been a favorite of mine. I remember when I
was a kid living in rural Tennessee, we would, uh
(20:14):
we I would go down to the to this sort
of sandy spot near our house, and I would watch
the ant lions in action and kind of and try
to poke a little sticks down to rile them up. Uh.
If you're not familiar with what an antline is, um,
they are essentially the star Lac from Star Wars. Like
basically that's the concept, except on a much smaller level.
And they're just the perfect creature for the twelve year
(20:37):
old boy and all of us. Um. By the way,
my daughter calls me star like when she's mad at me. Really, so,
the ant lion is actually the larval creature here. It's
he's one of these situations where it's this particular species
is most famous in its larval stage and it's incomplete stage. Uh,
(20:57):
it eventually becomes an aunt griffin. Nobody really cares about
the ant griffin because it's just kind of boring. It
flies around, uh and you know, and and and breeds
and all the important things that an adult insect needs
to do. But this larval ant lion is the one
that blazes and a pretty impressive trap. What the ant
lion does is it digs a pit, all right, and
(21:18):
it places itself at the bottom. So in the same
way that a human might create a tiger pit with
steaks at the bottom, it's doing a similar thing, except
it is the steak all right. So if it were
in the Winnie the Pooh plot, it would have been
Tigger who jumped into the pit and waited for the facts.
And I guess, yeah, pretty much. So these these guys
(21:38):
are pretty amazing to look at two, because they have
this really globular abdomen, you know, there's very much in
keeping with a with a larval creature. But then they
have this flattened head and these huge sickle shaped jaws. Okay,
so they'll dig their way down into this hole with
their you know, butt first, so that their heads are
at the top, all right, and then they'll you know,
(21:58):
they're so they're burrowed in at the bottom of this
little pit. So an aunt comes along slides into the hole,
crawls into the hole, and then they'll start flinging sand
up one side of the pit, using upward jerks to
their heads, making it difficult for the ant to escape.
And then when the ant falls to the bottom, bam,
they pierce them with those sickle shaped jaws and they
suck them dry. Right, So you're probably thinking, why so fierce,
(22:22):
why so silent? So the lambs here with this pit.
The reason is that their larval stage is three years long.
I mean that's a long time to be in that
sort of stage where you know that you're you needed
a lot of protein, a lot of energy to to
grow out of. So think about newborn babies. Were they
(22:44):
to remain in that stage for three years, they'd have
to learn to do it on their own a bit. Yeah,
they would. They would grow a very fierce set of mandibles,
and they might start hunting woodland creatures with these pits.
And you can kind of understand why they go to
such lengths to trap prey. Yeah, because I think of
the caterpillar, right. The caterpillar has to eat a lot
of material in order to gear up for that metamorphosis
(23:08):
into its next stage, into its its final stage of
of life. But it gets to just eat, you know,
limitless leaves to to. In order to to reach that point,
the ant lion has to feed off a flesh and
therefore it has to have these amazing sickle shaped jaws.
It has to have this really cool um pit based
hunting style and just laser in ambush to to suck
(23:31):
itself some some some ants. The next guys are going
to kind of make these these horrible fierce mandibles look
like nothing, look like a dream. These are the Amazonian ants.
And we're talking about a torture rack here. Yes. Uh.
The the way that I would like to set this
up for everyone is imagine you were at Chuck E
(23:53):
Cheese or a carnival or some variation of a carnival
or Chuck e Cheese. Right, what they always have they
always have the whack a Mole area. Well they have cheese,
but they have the whack a Mole game. Right. The
whack amole game, of course, has is this this platform
has all these holes and then these moles, these cartoon
moles will pop up. And what happens when a mole
pops up, Well you take this hammer and you just
(24:14):
slam it, or you attempt to you. Of course, it's
too fast usually for you to actually get the mole,
and it's frustrating and you won't get your ticket and
be able to turn that ticket in for a toy.
This it's okay, Julie's okay. So this will make you
feel better or maybe worse about the whole scenario. Imagine
that you went up to one of these whack a
Mole games and when you got too close, and let's
(24:34):
say you reach out and actually touch the surface of it,
several of the moles came out and grabbed your limbs
and held you in place against the whack a Mole game.
You can't move, you're struggling, but they're just holding on tight.
They're pulling you tighter and tighter. And then a whole
bunch of other moles emerged on the other side of
the machine, and they have hypodermic needles loaded with poison,
and may you start jabbing you with those things and
(24:55):
injecting you, and then suddenly you're paralyzed. They drag you
away to their their din and do god knows what
with you. They tear you limb from limb ah. This
is the Amazonian aunt, my friends. This is basically what
it goes on with these guys. I mean, instead of
the little whack a mole platform, they're just using some
plant material. Yeah, but they but they definitely constructed. And
(25:18):
that's the amazing that they basically build their own whackamole
machine here. Uh, they're torturous whackamo machine. They cut hairs
from the stem of the plant that they inhabit, and
they use the tiny fibers to build this spongey snare
and uh, and indeed it's kind of like a torture
rack because anything that walks across that surface. They It's
important to know that they also drill the whackamole holes
(25:42):
in the surface and if your lag, if you're an insect,
and your leg will fit into one of those holes.
When you walk across it, they will grab onto it
because they're lurking underneath there. They'll grab onto it, hold
you in place, and once they have you secured, a
whole bunch of other ants will come up and have
at you. Yeah, they'll sting you into paralysis. I really
like this description from this BBC article called fierce ants
(26:05):
build torture rac Once the prey is well secured by
jaws fastening all its extremities. It has stretched over the
platform like an ancient sacrifice to the gods. Yeah. I
like that. I like a clearly that, like the the
author was just in total awe of this, uh this,
uh the situation, and by all rights they should have been,
(26:26):
because it's it's it's amazing and you have to I
mean answer pretty amazing. Anyway, We've seen plenty of examples
of ants. You know, they build these these fabulous colonies.
In many cases, they're they're they're farming, they're they're bringing
leaves back in order to to grow their own food
within the you know, the belly of their colony. So
(26:46):
we we know that answer pretty advanced. We know, we
we've covered before some of the various ways that they
wage war, that they that they build their societies. And
here's just another example of their amazing ways of working
together to uh to pull something off, in this case
the limbs of another creature. Yeah. I was just thinking,
I think I'm going to revise, uh, my my idea
(27:07):
of being you know, uh, becoming a little little futition Julie,
a little tiny Julie and meeting my fate with a spider. Um,
I don't think that would be the most fearsome thing.
I think it would be these guys, you think so, yeah,
being torn as under? Yeah, stretched, m m, yeah yeah.
I'd be hard pressed to decide which which one I
(27:28):
would I would find the most nightmareck to encounter. I
guess I tend to side with like the ant lion
or the trapdoor spider, just because both of them are
the idea of falling into something, falling into an environment
where where you have no control and then you're consumed
(27:49):
by the monster and you know, it's like a dark
space or pit. I don't know it, just those those
ideas feel me with with more dread fair enough, but
I guess I would hold up. I feel like maybe
I would have a better chance against the ant lion
just because it's it's a little simpler trap, whereas the
spider is going to outmaneuver me at every turn. So
I'm going to say the trapdoor spider is the the
(28:12):
one that scares me the most. You write the antline,
they really have to rely on their ability and move
from dirt quickly your way to try to get you
off course. So you might have a chance there you know,
mentioning the star Lac and the antline. I wonder, And
I know there's a lot of expanded Universe material out
there about Star Wars, and I know some of our
listeners have probably read it. Has anyone ever formulated an
(28:35):
idea of the star Lac? That the star Lac is
a larva and that it is eventually, if it eats enough,
like you know, Jedi and Goblinman, that it's gonna you know,
sprout wings and fly off and be some sort of fabulous,
beautiful creature. I don't know, but I will now when
I get home, consult my daughter's Star Wars encyclopedia to
see what they have to say on the matter. That is,
how big is that thing? I think I saw something
(28:57):
like two characters, and don't She'll rattle off a bunch
of them. I mean, I know a good amount of them,
but there are some that seem extremely obscure to me.
And uh, it's amazing. She'll tell me the species the
home planet. Yeah, what's her? What's her absolute favorite? Starts
Star Wars subject to talk about? Um subject? Well, it's
(29:19):
Darth Vader. I mean, she's completely preoccupied by his duality,
you know, that that he was Anakin and became Darth Vader.
And I think a lot of kids are intrigued by
that because they begin to understand this idea of good
and evil forces. Yeah, I remember, you know, being into
Darth Vader as a kid. I think that was something
that really attracted you to because it's like that first
(29:40):
villain character that you you you realize it is not
just this well of darkness that there is, uh, that
they fell from grace. I mean it's you know, in
that since it's kind of a satan character, but it's
actually broken down a lot easier for you to consume
than than the devil is at at that stage in
your mental development, right, And he's been transformed armed in
(30:00):
now he's sort of even um, he's even sort of
trapped in his own I would say, not his design,
but Emperor Palpatine's design, and he's sort ofly half man
half droid. Yeah, he's he's a fabulous It's easy to
overlook how fabulous the Darth Vader character is when you know,
you see him in commercials and stuff nowadays and you've
grown up with him, but you know, certainly a fabulous character,
for sure. There's a really funny book out. I don't
(30:22):
know if it's exactly for kids, but it's about like
Darth Vader and his relationship to his teenage daughter. I
wish I could remember the title right now, but it's
a very funny stuff. Awesome. I'll have to post it
on the old Facebook. Well, there you go. It's a
trap and it's a good thing. We ended up talking
about Star Wars because we got the title for the
episode from from Star Wars when they when they were fun.
(30:43):
It's a trap, right exactly. So hey, do we have
time for listener mail. Yeah, let's toss one out there. Okay, well,
let's call over our droid, our mail droid, and see
what we have to read here. All right, here's one
that comes to us from Colin. Colin, right sin in
response to our Uncanny music episode we did around um
October and around Halloween. He says, Hi, Julian Robert, I
(31:06):
was catching up on the podcast and I felt I
absolutely had to suggest a soundtrack relating to the Uncanny
Music episode. The Eerie soundtrack, produced by Jene Paptiste de
lab Companies the two thousands seven French film Water Lilies. Robert,
I think you will really like this album. Thanks for
the podcast. PS. I do believe the film is available
on Netflix. I actually I checked this out and uh
(31:29):
and the the artist on this I believe he records
under the name peril One and it's available. This is
a soundtrack is available in full on SoundCloud from the
artist himself, and it is really good. I listened to
it like four times in a row when I was
working the other day. So so thanks Colin for that
music recommendation. Pretty cool. We've got a quick one from Jacqueline.
She says, this is a wonderful show and I'm always
left wishing it was longer. I just listened to the
(31:51):
Normalcy Bias podcast. It was excellent and I'm fascinated to
learn more. I was inspired to hunt down the episode
on the rat King, which we referenced. In that episode,
she says, I used to work at a semi secret
underground animal testing lab. I was a rat keeper. It
was under a complex of cutting edge hospitals. On breaks
and lunchtime, the hazmat cleaner would come down and eat
with us. He was an extremely eccentric man, but one
(32:13):
of his rants was about the rat king. We never
understood one on Earth he was talking about, and now
it's making so much more sense after all these years.
It's wonderful to have to have it come full circle
and find out he wasn't as much of a loon
as we thought he was l o L. I had
never even considered that there was extant folklore or documented
clusters of rats. I just thought it was something his
(32:36):
mind concocted as a result of his fairly traumatic job.
As always, I learned so much. Thank you for your
work and the entertaining show. There's so much I love
about this um. There's a semi secret underground animal testing.
There's the Hasmat person who now I want to go
to my my nearest has Matt person and find out
all the secrets of every building. Perhaps I don't want
(32:58):
because I love this because I'm inagining like an underground complex.
And then there's like the break room and the mister room,
and they're having uh, you know, lunch with this dude
in a full hazmat suit. Who's who's really breaking down
the seriousness of the rat king threat? Right? And they're like,
oh man, he's gonna say he's gonna bring up the
rat king. Good stuff. Thank you so much. Jaqueline. All right,
(33:20):
So hey, you want to get in touch with us,
You want to share your thoughts on topics that we've
covered before, thoughts topics that we might cover in the future.
If you want to check out our various blog posts,
our videos, just about anything we might be up to,
links to our social media accounts, go to Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. I can't stress that enough.
That is the place to go for all your stuff
to blow your mind content, including every podcast episode we've
(33:43):
ever done, stuff you won't even find on iTunes anymore.
Go there and you'll find links out to our Facebook account,
to our Twitter account, our Tumbler account, our Google Plus account,
our SoundCloud account, uh YouTube account, and who knows, they're
probably accounts that we have I don't even know about.
There are mystery accounts. Sure check it out. Let's blow
your mind dot com and if you would like to
send us an email, you may do so. A blow
(34:05):
the mind at Discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics, says that how Stuff Works
dot Com
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wanting to stuff to about your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
were you able to make it to work today without
finding yourself trapped and snared or otherwise captured by some
(00:23):
sort of large arachnet or insect barely bare sort of
like metal arachnets traffic? Yeah, yeah, I took the train,
so I had to deal with actual giant arachnets in
the subway tunnels. But but generally, I mean, you know,
they're just going about their business. All they want to
do is protect their young and lay more if they're young,
(00:43):
inside your belly. And can you blame them? I know,
I mean it's especially on a cold day like this,
that's the warmest place to delay them your your brood
of eggs. Yes, seventeen degrees in the south here, all right.
So what we're talking about, if you guys are picking
up what we're putting down here, are traps, Yes, because
you know, as humans were pretty good tool users, we
(01:04):
create traps all the time. But out there in nature
there's stuff going on. Yeah, I mean, human traps are
almost limitless. I mean, you can start with the really
basic stuff, like you just take a like a tiger pit.
You know, here's a pit, cover it with some some brush.
After I've dug it out, something walks across the top,
it falls in. Now I've caught myself a tiger or
a person or what have you. There's a and then
(01:27):
if you want to up the anti, maybe you have
a sticks at the bottom of it, a sharpened stick
so that someone falls in, then they're going to potentially
be impaled upon those sticks. You have simple animal traps.
Have you ever used one of these, like to catch
wild animals or cats for Spade in the Neutering No,
we we My wife and I did a little of
that at our previous house. And it's, uh, it's it's
(01:49):
pretty wild stuff because you'll catch multiple things. We were
trying to At one point we were trying to catch
a dog that like a puppy that was in the
neighborhood and it was, you know, sweet little dog but
clearly had no owner, was eating garbage and we gotta
catch this dog. We can, we can do some good
for this dock. But ultimately that dog was too wary. Instead,
we caught like three different possums. We caught two different
(02:10):
stray cats, and that eventually led into doing some spandar
during with those guys, and then we caught our own
cat twice. Was this just a day of like catching things?
Was just like, hey, we're gonna go out and we've
got this trap. You know, just set it up in
the night, you catch a possums, set it up in
the day, you catch your own cat, that kind of thing. Yeah,
and then then ideally that I think the county would
(02:31):
come and take it away. But but yeah, that's a
fun little trap. But then there are there are far
less fun traps that we've devised. Of course, when you
get into the world of land mines, we create explosive devices,
uh that that that you know triggered one one steps
on them or when you know, some proximity mind of
some kind, and and those are of course, uh, pretty
deadly and pretty horrible inventions. But throughout all of this
(02:54):
we we tend to think, well, hey, that's humans were
tool users. We make things, We make things that react
to the presence of others. We create all of these, uh,
these traps. Be it's something rather simple like a little
box of a twig or or something advanced like a landmine.
We're wildy, we're clever. Yeah, there couldn't be any other
(03:14):
animal or insect or arachnid out there that could be
as clever as us. Uh, that is not true. We're wrong. Yeah,
And specifically in this podcast, we're going to talk about
arachnids and insects creatures that we can't We generally just
think there's no way that these guys are up to
anything on the level of human beings. And you know,
I couldn't help but think of Charlotte's Web when we
(03:35):
were looking at this material. Because spiders obviously are featured
pretty well in this area of trapping things, we tend
to think about them as these passive trappers. But I
was thinking about Charlotte A cavodica in in Charlotte's Web,
and how when Wilburt figures out that she's like basically
sucking the blood out of these insects, He's just recoils
(03:57):
and Horror doesn't necessarily want to be friends with her,
and then she kind of lays it down for him, like, look,
this is how I survive. You get things brought to
you in a piale you, you lucky pig. I I
have to use my wits, and I come from generations
and generations of trappers. Yeah, and I don't think a
pig has a lot of room to judge a spider really.
(04:17):
I mean, pigs are not above doing a little killing
for their their food. Well, sure, but in this instance,
and particularly in this story, it was it was this
great moment where it's like, you know, you can't necessarily
judge another person, animal insect for the behavior because they're
just doing what survival needs them to do. And so
(04:40):
that is what I think is so interesting about spiders
and their traps, because it's fascinating these these webs that
they create, and as you have pointed out in an
earlier conversation with me, sometimes they don't even have a web. Yeah,
that's one thing about spiders. I mean, Cope, we have
to go to spiders first, because they are They're the
animal you think of when you think of an a
will laying a trap. I mean, the spiderweb itself is
(05:02):
kind of a metaphor for any kind of a trap
or enscarement, or some sort of complex system of ensnaring
someone or something. But yeah, a lot of a lot
of spiders are don't actually spin webs, so they don't
use their silk and hunting at all. They're just using
them as building materials um or you know, to create
a nursery. Or they're using them as a drag line.
It's sort of, you know, a mountain climbing a line
(05:24):
to use in the navigating their environment. But then there
are a number of spiders that do use their web,
and we we generally, we generally go to the orb
web spiders first because that's the more um iconic spider web,
that big orb shaped web. Flies fly into them and uh,
and then the spider comes and and creeps across the
(05:45):
web and fix them off and and generally that's our
When we think of giant spiders in fantasy and sci fi,
they tend to be a giant orb spider. But that's
just one of the many different ways that different species
of spiders use their webs, generally in some sort of
hunting or trapping scenario. Yeah, and this is from the
(06:06):
article how Spiders Worked by Tom Harris. I thought this
was such a great description of spiders. He says, spiders
are predators above all else, so hunting and killing is
where they really shine in the bug world. Spiders are
fairly fearsome animals. They're the tiny equivalent of wolves, lions,
or sharks. Yeah, they're basically second only to the wasp
(06:26):
because the wasp is just gonna rule over the spider
every time. It's true. And we recently were talking about
how if you could just somehow, through the power of alchemy,
I don't know, uh, miniaturize us humans. I would have
to say that if we if right now, if I
were just about, you know, a fourth of an inch tall,
if a spider was coming at me, this would be
(06:47):
the thing that I dreaded the most, more than a
cockroach or really anything else. Yeah, I mean the spiders
would be fighting over you. It's the thing. Yeah, in
that sense, you have a certain amount of power. You'd
be like you'd be like the wife of Ulysses, where
you have all the suitors coming for you, right and
you get to you get to make ridiculous demands of
your various spider suitors, which one will get to devour you.
And still I would not take it as a compliment.
(07:11):
Let's do a quick anatomy of a web, because, as
you say, you know or spiderweb classic here. Um, if
you look at how a spider constructs a web, it
all begins with silk line that is cast out into
the wind. And when the spider census it's caught upon something,
it will sense a starting point and use that connection
(07:31):
as a bridge. And this is really cool. Um. You
can actually see how this works in an article called
how spiders Work. And when that spider crosses that bridge,
it actually drops another loose thread and it climbs down
on this thread and creates a kind of y configuration.
And from here on out it will start to create these, um,
(07:53):
you don't know, I guess you could call them anchor points,
and you have the sort of V configuration, and then
it starts to lay out these radius points from the
center of the web to the thread. So now you
have these non sticky auxiliary spirals that it creates. And
the reason why it creates these non sticky parsons because
that's the part that it's going to actually travel on
(08:14):
the web, and then it creates another spiral that is sticky.
So it's amazing to me is that it's created this
complex web, but it has also given itself a pathway
on which to to tread. It Yeah, it's it's really fascinating.
One of the things that's top and overlooked is that indeed,
not all spider web is sticky, and they're in some
of these structures that we're going to discuss, some of
these traps and uh and web environments that are not
(08:38):
even sticky at all. So um so, yeah, the orb
orb web spider, the orb webs, the big iconic web.
But then there are a number of other ones we're
gonna go through. Some of these, uh, some bear more
mentioned than others. For instance, triangle spiders make triangular webs,
and these are essentially like imagine the orb web, and
imagine if you cut a pizza sized uh slice of
(08:59):
that web, that would essentially be a triangle whip. Otherwise,
it's basically the same idea, just on a smaller scale.
Now where it starts getting a little more interesting to
get into the world of funnel spiders. Now, funnel spiders
they make a sheet of silk and then they wrap
them up and they to make this funnel, you know,
just like taking a newspaper and rolling it up right, uh.
And the funnels have a big opening on one end,
(09:20):
and that's so where they catch the prey. And they
also have a small opening in the back and that's
the escape hatch in case the spider needs to run
for it. Okay, and it's not sticky, but the idea
here is that the spiders can move around really easily
in this uh, this funnel environment. They've basically made a
you know, home turf killing room where they have a
(09:41):
maximum ownership over their prey. So that in itself is
pretty pretty amazing. It's not not exactly a trap, but
it's a It's they've created an environment that they have
just absolute control over and uh and and an outsider
is going going to be an outsider in that that
web of death. And I like thinking about it in
that way because it moves this idea from spiders is
(10:03):
creating these passive traps to really being tool users and
really premeditating the kills that they exact. Yeah, it's like
if a like if a serial killer was that was
the kind of would bring somebody back to his or
her apartment, and they knew exactly where they had the uh,
you know, their murder weapon stashed, where they had the
various instruments, where the escape routes were going to be. Again,
(10:26):
a complete home turf advantage, and that's what the funnel
spider creates here. Now, another thing is that a lot
of these webs will have a kind of anchor thread,
and this anchor thread sometimes is used to get on
and off of that spider web, but in most cases
it actually used is used as a kind of um
trip wire. And it's so sensitive and the spider can
(10:49):
tell so much from the movement that it can actually
know if it's a leaf that's hit it, or if
it's just the wind, or if it is indeed the
vibrations from an insect. Yeah, So they wouldn't fooled to, say,
by a child's finger poking in or something. Yeah, probably not.
They would probably know pretty soon that they were about
to be scooped up, put under a magnifying glass and
then set on fire. Now, a number of different spiders
(11:11):
these webs that are far less complex their cobweb spiders,
you know, and then everyone knows what a cobweb is.
It's just a small random mess of silk strings. Just
throw it together and see what gets caught in it. Right.
Mesh web spiders very similar. You'll find often find these
in grassy fields, under stones and dead leaves. Uh. Their
sheet web spiders that basically make webs that are formed
(11:32):
out of the different sheets of the silk and there's
just sort of jumbled together and not a lot of
large gaps to be found there though. One interesting type
of sheet web spiders are the bowl and doily spiders. Now,
what the spider does in this situation is it makes
an inverted dome shaped web, kind of like a you know,
like a bowl, all right, and that's suspended above a
(11:55):
horizontal sheet web, and that's the that's the doily, and
the spider hangs from the underside of the dome and
attacks prey. So you have to look at pictures of
that one, because it's a pretty pretty phenomenal looking web.
It just looks like some sort of crazy space structure.
And I like that there's a doily like a nod
to your grandmother's coffee table drink on top of it.
(12:15):
Um that reminds me of something called a net casting spider.
And this can be found across the world in tropical
and subtropical regions, and it's also known as the ogre
faced spider because of its distinctive really big eyes and
that helps them to see prey during the nighttime. But
what's notable about this is that they build cobweb sacks
that are held open with their front legs and they
(12:36):
have an anchor threat on it. Okay, and there's that
anchor thread that acts as a trip wire. And the
really cool thing is that when this spider sensus a vibration,
it will drop that net that it's holding with its
leg over the insect and a thousands of a second.
It's good. It's amazing. There's some really cool footage of
(12:58):
this on BBC. But it kind of reminds me of
like a character out of a mob movie. It's just
like throwing a hood over, you know, unpecting person and
drag them off and hit them with a bag of oranges. Now,
another that type of spider that does something just really
amazing with its web are the the Ceclosu spiders. And
(13:19):
these these guys they make a they make a more
or a standard web and and so you know, you're
not really impressed by that, but they make a decoy
of themselves in the web. They craft this out of leaves,
bits of dead insects, you know, the normal type of
craft that a spider is gonna find and in some
of these cases it even has the correct number of legs,
(13:42):
like it will even have eight legs on it. So
what they've created here is the decoy to confuse predators,
and if the spider is disturbed, it vibrates the web.
It vibrates its body, which vibrates the web, which causes
the decoy to vibrate and look even more lifelike. So
in other words, if it senses that there's a predator round,
it'll start to say, it'll start to shake it. Yeah,
(14:03):
the decoin be like, hey, I'm over here, I'm over here.
And in most times these decoys are much larger than
the spider itself. Yeah, so it can easily hyeah. That's
the other thing. It's a much larger spiders, a scarier
vision of the spider than it's than it actually creates itself.
But the amazing part of that, I mean, just stop
for second to think about this. This is interacted, lowly iracted,
(14:25):
and it has created uh an artistic interpretation of itself. Essentially,
That's what I was sitting here thinking that it has
the ability to understand what it looks like. And presumably
it's not sitting around with a mirror, you know, looking
inside the mirror, maybe a giant water droplet and looking
at the reflection. But in some way it can figure
out the dimensions of itself and recreate them. You know.
(14:47):
It brings to mind that that episode we did on
the Cracking and where we discuss the controversial theory that
these there is some prehistoric um cephalopods that would take
prehistorics sea creatures and crunch their bodies and create basically
a work of art that resembles themselves, which if you
(15:08):
if you just look at it that way, then yes,
it's mind blowing but also a little potentially a little crazy.
But the but the idea that that this particular squid,
this prehistoric squid might have been making a decoy of
itself out of the bodies of its victims, well that
is a little more in keeping with what we're seeing
here with the spiders. So I'm not saying it makes me,
you know, fall behind that cracking theory, but I feel
(15:30):
like it gives it a little more, a little more beef.
So yeah, I mean that that's a spider as an artist,
but what about as an architect, as an engineer? Ah? Yes,
And in this we get into the world of the
trap door spiders. These guys really up the anti here
because what they are doing is they're they're kind of
like taking the the idea of the you know, the
(15:51):
funnel web, but they're they're they're taking it to the
next level. So trapdoor spiders are essentially large spiders that
are close relatives of tarantulas. And they build these two
black tunnels in the side of of of a bank. Okay, uh.
They dig the tunnel, then they reinforce it with a
mixture of earth and saliva, and then they add a
layer of silk on top of that. So it's not
(16:13):
just I dug a hole and I'm gonna hide in it. No,
They've crafted a hole. This is like the kind of
tunnel of you know, you would hear about in the
Great Escape, where there's all this like structuring behind it. Right,
they've smoothed out the tunnel. And the reason for this
is that because eventually this tunnel could be used for
bringing up some young uns right right, and and just
ease of movement through it. They again, it's kind of
like the idea of the funnel. They won't have maximum
(16:34):
control over this environment, maximum maneuverability within it. So they
have this uh, this this hole, this fancy tunnel on
the side of this bank. But then they add the
final touch, and the final touch is they add a
trap door. Now there are two types. There's like a
court type trap door, which is thick and it's fitted,
and then there's this wafer type door, which is basically
(16:55):
just a sheet of silk and dirt. But either way,
they're both hinged like a like a really elaborate web hinge. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, it's amazing just to think that they could
fit the trap door in there, and by the way
that that one that's fit has a beveled edge, actually
fits in there. But it's that hinge that makes it
so amazing. And that's when you sit there and say,
(17:17):
how could you say this is not a tool user. Yeah,
you know, they've used granted they've used something that's come
out of their own body, but they combine that with
elements of the world around them to create this totally
artificial environment. Yeah. I mean, they've created this hatch that
they can surprise prey with because they feel the vibrations
of that prey coming along and then say ha ha,
(17:38):
here I am snatch you and I'm gonna take you
down into my tunnel, and maybe there's even some little
children here that would like to eat. Yeah, and then
sometimes it depends on this the exact species, but sometimes
they are there are branching corridors in the tunnel. Sometimes
they are multiple trap doors. It's essentially they build a
hobbit hole. It's like if if if you had a
hobbit hole, and then if you got too close to
(17:58):
the door, Froda would jump out and drag you inside
and suck all your blood out. Why is that terrifying?
I mean, Froda is not typically terrifying, but why in
that context, just because he's up to no good? He's sneaky,
you know. Yeah, I feel like there's some sort of
distent memory from Sin City that has melded with that
to sor Yeah, well, he's always playing creepy rolls these days.
He's in that remix of Maniac. I think it is
(18:20):
all right. Well, let's take a quick break and when
we get back, we will continue just to to take
out this house reports in the form of insects and traps.
We're back, Robert, did you know that there is a
(18:42):
terrible creature roaming the hundred Agar Woods. This is where
the backs and fell backs. And yes, that's where Winnie
the Pool lives, along with his friends and Christopher Robbins
and some mythical creature they made up called the Backs.
And I don't remember the facts. I remember the jagular Jack.
You are, yes. And of course all these plots I
(19:02):
have discovered, um, you know, reading these to my child
and watching the movies. It's all based on miscommunication, isn't
it comedy of errors? It's very shakespeareance. But in this instance,
the backson is a misreading of a note that says
back soon. Uh. You know, all the characters from the
hundred Acre Woods think that Christopher Robbins has been taken
by this backs, And so they create a pit, of
(19:26):
course classic, and they cover the pit with a picnic blanket.
They anchor it with stones, and they put an empty
honey jar in the middle. Oh, I see where this
is going, all to trap the Bacs in. But of
course what happens. We need to poose the backs and
all along. No, we need the Pooh, being a bear
of very little brains eat great huge heart, knows that
(19:51):
that honey pot is empty, and yet he still falls
for it. He still sees it and he goes for it. Anyway.
The point is traps abound everywhere. Children's imaginations, arachnids, and
in something called ant lions. Yes, the ant lion has
long been a favorite of mine. I remember when I
was a kid living in rural Tennessee, we would, uh
(20:14):
we I would go down to the to this sort
of sandy spot near our house, and I would watch
the ant lions in action and kind of and try
to poke a little sticks down to rile them up. Uh.
If you're not familiar with what an antline is, um,
they are essentially the star Lac from Star Wars. Like
basically that's the concept, except on a much smaller level.
And they're just the perfect creature for the twelve year
(20:37):
old boy and all of us. Um. By the way,
my daughter calls me star like when she's mad at me. Really, so,
the ant lion is actually the larval creature here. It's
he's one of these situations where it's this particular species
is most famous in its larval stage and it's incomplete stage. Uh,
(20:57):
it eventually becomes an aunt griffin. Nobody really cares about
the ant griffin because it's just kind of boring. It
flies around, uh and you know, and and and breeds
and all the important things that an adult insect needs
to do. But this larval ant lion is the one
that blazes and a pretty impressive trap. What the ant
lion does is it digs a pit, all right, and
(21:18):
it places itself at the bottom. So in the same
way that a human might create a tiger pit with
steaks at the bottom, it's doing a similar thing, except
it is the steak all right. So if it were
in the Winnie the Pooh plot, it would have been
Tigger who jumped into the pit and waited for the facts.
And I guess, yeah, pretty much. So these these guys
(21:38):
are pretty amazing to look at two, because they have
this really globular abdomen, you know, there's very much in
keeping with a with a larval creature. But then they
have this flattened head and these huge sickle shaped jaws. Okay,
so they'll dig their way down into this hole with
their you know, butt first, so that their heads are
at the top, all right, and then they'll you know,
(21:58):
they're so they're burrowed in at the bottom of this
little pit. So an aunt comes along slides into the hole,
crawls into the hole, and then they'll start flinging sand
up one side of the pit, using upward jerks to
their heads, making it difficult for the ant to escape.
And then when the ant falls to the bottom, bam,
they pierce them with those sickle shaped jaws and they
suck them dry. Right, So you're probably thinking, why so fierce,
(22:22):
why so silent? So the lambs here with this pit.
The reason is that their larval stage is three years long.
I mean that's a long time to be in that
sort of stage where you know that you're you needed
a lot of protein, a lot of energy to to
grow out of. So think about newborn babies. Were they
(22:44):
to remain in that stage for three years, they'd have
to learn to do it on their own a bit. Yeah,
they would. They would grow a very fierce set of mandibles,
and they might start hunting woodland creatures with these pits.
And you can kind of understand why they go to
such lengths to trap prey. Yeah, because I think of
the caterpillar, right. The caterpillar has to eat a lot
of material in order to gear up for that metamorphosis
(23:08):
into its next stage, into its its final stage of
of life. But it gets to just eat, you know,
limitless leaves to to. In order to to reach that point,
the ant lion has to feed off a flesh and
therefore it has to have these amazing sickle shaped jaws.
It has to have this really cool um pit based
hunting style and just laser in ambush to to suck
(23:31):
itself some some some ants. The next guys are going
to kind of make these these horrible fierce mandibles look
like nothing, look like a dream. These are the Amazonian ants.
And we're talking about a torture rack here. Yes. Uh.
The the way that I would like to set this
up for everyone is imagine you were at Chuck E
(23:53):
Cheese or a carnival or some variation of a carnival
or Chuck e Cheese. Right, what they always have they
always have the whack a Mole area. Well they have cheese,
but they have the whack a Mole game. Right. The
whack amole game, of course, has is this this platform
has all these holes and then these moles, these cartoon
moles will pop up. And what happens when a mole
pops up, Well you take this hammer and you just
(24:14):
slam it, or you attempt to you. Of course, it's
too fast usually for you to actually get the mole,
and it's frustrating and you won't get your ticket and
be able to turn that ticket in for a toy.
This it's okay, Julie's okay. So this will make you
feel better or maybe worse about the whole scenario. Imagine
that you went up to one of these whack a
Mole games and when you got too close, and let's
(24:34):
say you reach out and actually touch the surface of it,
several of the moles came out and grabbed your limbs
and held you in place against the whack a Mole game.
You can't move, you're struggling, but they're just holding on tight.
They're pulling you tighter and tighter. And then a whole
bunch of other moles emerged on the other side of
the machine, and they have hypodermic needles loaded with poison,
and may you start jabbing you with those things and
(24:55):
injecting you, and then suddenly you're paralyzed. They drag you
away to their their din and do god knows what
with you. They tear you limb from limb ah. This
is the Amazonian aunt, my friends. This is basically what
it goes on with these guys. I mean, instead of
the little whack a mole platform, they're just using some
plant material. Yeah, but they but they definitely constructed. And
(25:18):
that's the amazing that they basically build their own whackamole
machine here. Uh, they're torturous whackamo machine. They cut hairs
from the stem of the plant that they inhabit, and
they use the tiny fibers to build this spongey snare
and uh, and indeed it's kind of like a torture
rack because anything that walks across that surface. They It's
important to know that they also drill the whackamole holes
(25:42):
in the surface and if your lag, if you're an insect,
and your leg will fit into one of those holes.
When you walk across it, they will grab onto it
because they're lurking underneath there. They'll grab onto it, hold
you in place, and once they have you secured, a
whole bunch of other ants will come up and have
at you. Yeah, they'll sting you into paralysis. I really
like this description from this BBC article called fierce ants
(26:05):
build torture rac Once the prey is well secured by
jaws fastening all its extremities. It has stretched over the
platform like an ancient sacrifice to the gods. Yeah. I
like that. I like a clearly that, like the the
author was just in total awe of this, uh this,
uh the situation, and by all rights they should have been,
(26:26):
because it's it's it's amazing and you have to I
mean answer pretty amazing. Anyway, We've seen plenty of examples
of ants. You know, they build these these fabulous colonies.
In many cases, they're they're they're farming, they're they're bringing
leaves back in order to to grow their own food
within the you know, the belly of their colony. So
(26:46):
we we know that answer pretty advanced. We know, we
we've covered before some of the various ways that they
wage war, that they that they build their societies. And
here's just another example of their amazing ways of working
together to uh to pull something off, in this case
the limbs of another creature. Yeah. I was just thinking,
I think I'm going to revise, uh, my my idea
(27:07):
of being you know, uh, becoming a little little futition Julie,
a little tiny Julie and meeting my fate with a spider. Um,
I don't think that would be the most fearsome thing.
I think it would be these guys, you think so, yeah,
being torn as under? Yeah, stretched, m m, yeah yeah.
I'd be hard pressed to decide which which one I
(27:28):
would I would find the most nightmareck to encounter. I
guess I tend to side with like the ant lion
or the trapdoor spider, just because both of them are
the idea of falling into something, falling into an environment
where where you have no control and then you're consumed
(27:49):
by the monster and you know, it's like a dark
space or pit. I don't know it, just those those
ideas feel me with with more dread fair enough, but
I guess I would hold up. I feel like maybe
I would have a better chance against the ant lion
just because it's it's a little simpler trap, whereas the
spider is going to outmaneuver me at every turn. So
I'm going to say the trapdoor spider is the the
(28:12):
one that scares me the most. You write the antline,
they really have to rely on their ability and move
from dirt quickly your way to try to get you
off course. So you might have a chance there you know,
mentioning the star Lac and the antline. I wonder, And
I know there's a lot of expanded Universe material out
there about Star Wars, and I know some of our
listeners have probably read it. Has anyone ever formulated an
(28:35):
idea of the star Lac? That the star Lac is
a larva and that it is eventually, if it eats enough,
like you know, Jedi and Goblinman, that it's gonna you know,
sprout wings and fly off and be some sort of fabulous,
beautiful creature. I don't know, but I will now when
I get home, consult my daughter's Star Wars encyclopedia to
see what they have to say on the matter. That is,
how big is that thing? I think I saw something
(28:57):
like two characters, and don't She'll rattle off a bunch
of them. I mean, I know a good amount of them,
but there are some that seem extremely obscure to me.
And uh, it's amazing. She'll tell me the species the
home planet. Yeah, what's her? What's her absolute favorite? Starts
Star Wars subject to talk about? Um subject? Well, it's
(29:19):
Darth Vader. I mean, she's completely preoccupied by his duality,
you know, that that he was Anakin and became Darth Vader.
And I think a lot of kids are intrigued by
that because they begin to understand this idea of good
and evil forces. Yeah, I remember, you know, being into
Darth Vader as a kid. I think that was something
that really attracted you to because it's like that first
(29:40):
villain character that you you you realize it is not
just this well of darkness that there is, uh, that
they fell from grace. I mean it's you know, in
that since it's kind of a satan character, but it's
actually broken down a lot easier for you to consume
than than the devil is at at that stage in
your mental development, right, And he's been transformed armed in
(30:00):
now he's sort of even um, he's even sort of
trapped in his own I would say, not his design,
but Emperor Palpatine's design, and he's sort ofly half man
half droid. Yeah, he's he's a fabulous It's easy to
overlook how fabulous the Darth Vader character is when you know,
you see him in commercials and stuff nowadays and you've
grown up with him, but you know, certainly a fabulous character,
for sure. There's a really funny book out. I don't
(30:22):
know if it's exactly for kids, but it's about like
Darth Vader and his relationship to his teenage daughter. I
wish I could remember the title right now, but it's
a very funny stuff. Awesome. I'll have to post it
on the old Facebook. Well, there you go. It's a
trap and it's a good thing. We ended up talking
about Star Wars because we got the title for the
episode from from Star Wars when they when they were fun.
(30:43):
It's a trap, right exactly. So hey, do we have
time for listener mail. Yeah, let's toss one out there. Okay, well,
let's call over our droid, our mail droid, and see
what we have to read here. All right, here's one
that comes to us from Colin. Colin, right sin in
response to our Uncanny music episode we did around um
October and around Halloween. He says, Hi, Julian Robert, I
(31:06):
was catching up on the podcast and I felt I
absolutely had to suggest a soundtrack relating to the Uncanny
Music episode. The Eerie soundtrack, produced by Jene Paptiste de
lab Companies the two thousands seven French film Water Lilies. Robert,
I think you will really like this album. Thanks for
the podcast. PS. I do believe the film is available
on Netflix. I actually I checked this out and uh
(31:29):
and the the artist on this I believe he records
under the name peril One and it's available. This is
a soundtrack is available in full on SoundCloud from the
artist himself, and it is really good. I listened to
it like four times in a row when I was
working the other day. So so thanks Colin for that
music recommendation. Pretty cool. We've got a quick one from Jacqueline.
She says, this is a wonderful show and I'm always
left wishing it was longer. I just listened to the
(31:51):
Normalcy Bias podcast. It was excellent and I'm fascinated to
learn more. I was inspired to hunt down the episode
on the rat King, which we referenced. In that episode,
she says, I used to work at a semi secret
underground animal testing lab. I was a rat keeper. It
was under a complex of cutting edge hospitals. On breaks
and lunchtime, the hazmat cleaner would come down and eat
with us. He was an extremely eccentric man, but one
(32:13):
of his rants was about the rat king. We never
understood one on Earth he was talking about, and now
it's making so much more sense after all these years.
It's wonderful to have to have it come full circle
and find out he wasn't as much of a loon
as we thought he was l o L. I had
never even considered that there was extant folklore or documented
clusters of rats. I just thought it was something his
(32:36):
mind concocted as a result of his fairly traumatic job.
As always, I learned so much. Thank you for your
work and the entertaining show. There's so much I love
about this um. There's a semi secret underground animal testing.
There's the Hasmat person who now I want to go
to my my nearest has Matt person and find out
all the secrets of every building. Perhaps I don't want
(32:58):
because I love this because I'm inagining like an underground complex.
And then there's like the break room and the mister room,
and they're having uh, you know, lunch with this dude
in a full hazmat suit. Who's who's really breaking down
the seriousness of the rat king threat? Right? And they're like,
oh man, he's gonna say he's gonna bring up the
rat king. Good stuff. Thank you so much. Jaqueline. All right,
(33:20):
So hey, you want to get in touch with us,
You want to share your thoughts on topics that we've
covered before, thoughts topics that we might cover in the future.
If you want to check out our various blog posts,
our videos, just about anything we might be up to,
links to our social media accounts, go to Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. I can't stress that enough.
That is the place to go for all your stuff
to blow your mind content, including every podcast episode we've
(33:43):
ever done, stuff you won't even find on iTunes anymore.
Go there and you'll find links out to our Facebook account,
to our Twitter account, our Tumbler account, our Google Plus account,
our SoundCloud account, uh YouTube account, and who knows, they're
probably accounts that we have I don't even know about.
There are mystery accounts. Sure check it out. Let's blow
your mind dot com and if you would like to
send us an email, you may do so. A blow
(34:05):
the mind at Discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics, says that how Stuff Works
dot Com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.