Why Are Camel Spiders Harmless?

Camel spiders have a fearsome reputation, but despite being large and fast, they're not a threat to humans. (Or camels. They're also technically not spiders.) Learn more about these fascinating creatures in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Voge obamb here. Some animals have a
reputation that's hard to shake. Take the camel spider. Many
Americans are familiar with them, based on photos that came
out of the Iraq War in the early two thousand's,
a giant desert spider with a leg span somewhere between
the size of a pack of cigarettes and a full

(00:23):
grown man's calf, though the latter one turned out to
be a trick of forced perspective. There were rumors they
ran through the desert, screaming and jumping on camels, that
they would hide an ambush and sleeping bags ready to
inject you with venom. But u S military personnel are
not the first to tell stories about the camel spider.
In South Africa, they're sometimes called beard trimmers because some

(00:44):
people believe that if you sleep on the ground, camel
spiders will come trim your hair in your sleep and
use it to line their nests. In parts of North Africa.
In the Middle East, legend has it that they chew
at the bellies of camels until their intestines fall out
so they can eat them, or that they can lay
their eggs in their stomachs. None of this is true,
of course, for starters. Camel spiders are not spiders at all,
but sol a few kids. These arachnids live on every

(01:07):
continent except Antarctica and Australia, and all one thousand, one
fifty species have eight legs and two body sections like spiders, scorpions, ticks,
and mites, but they're different enough to belong to their
own order. Secondly, they are aggressive, but they're also non venomous,
and the large jaws of most species can't even break
through human skin, much less at camel's belly. The largest

(01:28):
camel spider has a leg span of around six to
eight inches that's fifteen to twenty centimeters, which is big
for a spider, but it's not horror movie territory, and
they seem to take little to no observable interest in
human hair. We spoke with Christie Reddick, founder of The
Bug Chicks, an educational company that uses arthropods to teach
young people about social issues like prejudice, racism, educational potential,

(01:50):
and personal development. She said, the thing about sol a
few kids is you don't really need to make stuff
up about them for them to be fascinating. I was
in Kenya when I first saw one, and I went
to catch it, and it ran up the side of
the wall, right up to my eye height. It reared
back and rubbed its jaws together to stridulate. Some people
say they scream, but it's more of a hissing, rasping noise.
It had such an attitude I just fell in love.

(02:13):
It would seem difficult to fall in love with an
interractnet with the stage presence of a pro wrestler and
the body of an animal whose parts were scavenged from
the invertebrate salvage yard. But such is the allure of
the camel spider. Reddick said, if you do a rapid
count of what appears to be legs, they look like
they have ten legs, but their first pair are actually
mouth parts called pedipalps. I kind of think of them

(02:35):
as mouth hands. They help facilitate bringing prey into their
big jaws when they run. They use them kind of
like antenna or long legs in the front. They also
have mouth claws called chellisare which are used for a
dizzying variety of purposes, one of which seems to be
transferring packets of sperm from male to female camel spiders.
Most solifukids are nocturnal, extremely territorial, and top predators in

(02:59):
arid eco systems. They eat other predators in the same
size range as them, or a bit larger. They even
eat each other. They don't have venom. It's unnecessary because
their jaws are so powerful. They can manipulate their food
through their mouths by sawing their prey back and forth
like an old timey cartoon character eating a cob of corn.
Sol a few kids are also wildly fast, able to

(03:20):
reach speeds of about ten miles per hour that's sixteen
kilometers per hour, and seem to be able to run
for as long as you care to chase them. But
with that comes a metabolism that requires nearly constant fueling,
so they eat a lot. But that doesn't necessarily explain
one selifugid behavior, mass ant assassinations. For some reason, camel

(03:40):
spiders will sometimes go after an ant's nest, just tearing
ants in half left and right until they're surrounded by
an enormous heap of rended ant carcasses. Some scientists think
maybe they're killing the ants to save them as a
snack for later. But Reddick published a paper in about
the diet of selifu kids, and she and her co
author found that they don't cularly like eating ants. Another

(04:02):
explanation for this behavior could be that they're trying to
clear out the ant nest in order to find a
nice place to escape the desert sun. But it's really
a mystery as to why they do this. Arettick pointed
out that another possibility, though, is that camel spiders attack
ant nests to get at the larva and pupa inside.
She explained, these don't bite and are super soft, squishy,
little protein and fat bombs. But you can add the

(04:26):
mass murder of ants to the long list of things
scientists don't understand about. Solid few kids. But remember, even
though they act wild, they can't hurt you, Eretick said,
just because something is a predator or even defensive or aggressive,
it doesn't make it a bad or mean animal. Sol
a few kids have so much great attitude and they're
soft and fuzzy. When you pet one, it's like petting

(04:46):
a little mouse, a little demon mouse. Today's episode was
written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain
Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's House off Works.
For more on this and lots of other creepy Crawley topics,
visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And
for more podcasts for my heart radio, visit the i

(05:07):
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
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