STBYM Halftober Monsterfest Playlist, Episode 10: Giant Spider Meal

At least giant spiders are not trying to eat us. Right? Right? Let's close out Halftober Monsterfest with 2016's episode about what it would be like to be eaten by a giant spider.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stop
works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick
and Robert. You have seen the horror movies of the
nineteen fifties, I know you've delve deep into I've seen

(00:24):
a lot of them, and the ones I haven't seen,
I've I've watched the trailers. I mean, sometimes that's the
best way to enjoy a film. They put all the
best stuff in the trailers. But what was big then?
It was atomic age panic, right, Yeah, giant animals exactly right.
So there's nuclear testing, there's atomic radiation, and suddenly animals
become very big. And one of the animals they would

(00:45):
make very big, you know quite well, was the spider.
That's right. I mean with all of them, all you
need is a little camera magic, and you can make
anything look big. You didn't have to worry about having
some sort of fancy stop motion creature. You didn't have
to worry certainly with c g I or costumes. You're
just an actual spider. Yeah, film a tarantula and then
put it in the background, you know, superimposed with the

(01:06):
different sizes. Yeah, But so there's a sequence and pretty
much all these movies. I probably haven't seen them all,
but I've seen some of them where the spider lives
in a cave or something like that, and the people
are wandering near the cave and then somebody falls into
its web and the web is a hammock. It's just
a hann't it. It's a piece of like it's white

(01:28):
rope netting. Uh. And people get stuck to the hammock
and then the spiders coming. Sometimes they escape, sometimes it
eats them. It's generally a bella legostie pretends to wrestle
a rubber octopus level of awkward because you're like struggling
the hammock. Just just get up and get out of it.
You're clearly not stuck, right. But there's a part we

(01:48):
never see right now. Often the person gets away. If
the person gets eaten by the giant spider, we just
sort of see like a ah, and then the spiders approaching.
The music swells in. That's it. What happens after that cutaway? Well,
sometimes we find their bones later, sometimes their their their

(02:08):
cocoon body shows up later. But I can't think of
a film off hand that had a prolonged spider cut
death by spider death scene. I guess they really didn't
go for the intense, gross outgore scenes like that in
the nineteen fifties. But even if they did, what would
they be showing what actually happens when a spider eats

(02:30):
something at that scale? And that's going to be the
topic of today's conversation. So we're gonna imagine a nineteen
fifties Roger Corman atomic radiation movie, but we're gonna take
it to the next level and go beyond that cut away.
The movie is I was eaten by a giant spider.

(02:54):
But I guess first I should ask, for real, what's
your favorite giant spider movie? Oh? I mean, anytime a
giant spider turns up mir in for a good time.
I tend to lean more towards the stop motion ones.
Let's see, The Giant Spider Invasion is a lot of fun.
Never seen that this one? Who was an MST? Really yeah,
it was. It's really good. They're really good. It was

(03:16):
a really great MST episode. They they used actual spiders,
as I recall, and there's a there's this like really
gross kind of hillbilly character in it, and giant spiders
and somebody drives a car into a giant spider. How
big are the giant spiders? They are like construction equipment
big like, so they're ridiculous in terms of size. Um.

(03:39):
You know, another one I remember from Mystery Science Theater
three thousand is the I think Horrors of Spider Island.
That's a good one. That one. That one's one that
was like it was black and white. It's just a
real sleezy feel to it because it's like a bunch
of babes and like one very greased up muscleman that
are trapped in the island. He turned. It's it's like

(04:00):
a it's like a dude who has a bunch of
ladies who work on some nightclub act and they crash
on a spider island. I haven't seen that one, fairly contrived.
Come on, I haven't seen that one in years, but
I do remember, like it's a sweaty looking movie, and
I remember watching it on VHS and a very sweaty
college dorm. So it's just like I'm just sitting there
sweating at night, get my night sweats on, and here's

(04:23):
this just sweaty, weird, oppressive movie. Now, of course, another
big point that I'm sure a lot of you listening
right now are screaming. Is she labbed from Lord of
the Rings. I remember that from the movies. But can
I can I admit a little secret good? I've never
actually read the Lord of the Rings books in full.
I probably like the only nerd around here who would

(04:44):
admit that and expect to get out alive. Well, they're good?
Is that a call? I? I can't read them again until,
you know, maybe I'll read them with my son or something.
But I kept telling myself, I'll read them again when
I get the film adaptation is kind of out of
my head because I don't want to read them again
and have those visuals and informant, though the visuals were
often very good. In fact, I would say that the

(05:06):
giant spider she loved in the first Lord of the
Ring film, I think the second, the third one. The
third one I can't remember because I can't remember where
that where she shows up in the she shows us
versus the movies in the third movie when the Hobbits
are here, we can okay, So the Hobbits are in
more door, the evil land where you know they're towards
the end of their journey, but a big spider attacks. Okay,

(05:28):
I guess it was the third movie. It's the movie
is kind of blurred together for me, but but I
thought that that scene was fabulous. Like the spider the
computer animated is just perfect. Yeah, it's like it's basically
a huge tarantula. We also, though in Lord of the Rings,
never see exactly what would happen if the spider began
to feed. We see it bite somebody and cocoon them,

(05:51):
but it never starts to eat anybody. I have a
vague memory that the cinematic version of Sheilab also had
confusing anatomy, but there were there were aspects about it,
and certainly it's perfectly fine for a monster spider from
a fantasy uh product to have monstrous features that don't
line up with with actual real world spider biology. Like

(06:13):
I think she had a stinger or something. Maybe there
was some positor acually, I'm not sure what. Yeah, stinger
where like the silk spin orrets should have been. Yeah,
I remember she kind of like uh pegged Sam with
it at and that was kind of strange. But yeah, okay,
here's another one that I remember but not very well.
Doesn't doesn't Tim Curry turn into a spider at the

(06:33):
end of the movie? It? Yes, the uh, the the
nine TV miniseries. Uh, if you're like me, you probably
have fun and disturbing memories of this. Uh, this is
a book I read, probably too early, and then that
film came out, And of course Tim Curry is perfect

(06:53):
as Pennywise, the dancey clown and traumatized the whole generation. Yeah,
as we've said on this show before, any movie that
Tim Curry's in, he's the best part. Try to think
of a counter example. You can't. Yeah, he was great
and and particularly he was great in the first half
of that mini series, which was mostly the kid's stuff,
and that was the most effective part of that mini series.

(07:15):
I think the second part not as strong, and it
did include a big showdown with with it in a
giant alien spider form. Actually just looked it up on
YouTube and watched it before we came in here, and uh,
it's it's an impressive looking spider. It looks like a
large animatronic kind of spider. So I don't know if
it's really terrifying, but it is kind of a neat design. Okay,

(07:38):
definitely come out of a drain or something. They go
into a cave and then it has like it it shines,
it's dead lights through its u Torso I should I
should do some sort of like a monster the wheat
breakdown of it on the blog because it's an interesting
looking credit, but probably not another non scientifically perfect spider. Yeah,
even less so. And you know it's a it's a creature.

(07:59):
It's like out from the Toto's Darkness or whatever, so
you know it's it can get away with being completely alien.
But there are plenty of other cinematic giant spiders that
are look more like spiders, behave more like spiders. I
instantly think of Krul. Of course, there's a fabulous sequence
in there with a spider like she's like a spider queen,

(08:19):
and they're giant spiders all along the web and there's
a lot of the adventuring party has to make their
way across it gets stuck on a hammock? Is it
basically a hammock? And Krall I think think that I
want to remember it being a little more believable than
that because so many of the effects and Kral are
pretty top notch, but but I don't specifically remember. I
think it was a stop motion spider though I see

(08:41):
you have a note here Robert about an ewalk adventure. Yes, so, um,
we have a lot of Star Wars fans in the office. Um,
or at least we have Holly, and Holly is enough
of a Star Wars fan to like represent multiple people.
I think she's like she is. She's a true mendous
Star Wars fan, and I know that she has a

(09:02):
warm spound her heart for these as well. Some people
don't care for him. But there were a couple of
live action Ewok made for TV films that came out.
The first one was Urs Caravan of Courage and Ewok Adventure,
and that one features a giant some giant spiders on
a web. It's been a long time since I've seen
that one, and I remember it being good but also

(09:22):
kind of traumatic because there's a lot of like people
losing their family members in it. Um. But then there's
also a follow up. I think it's the Battle for Indoor,
and that one's that I have a lot of fun
memories of that one. Would watch that one over and
over again VHS because it has essentially orcs in it.
It has an evil, uh seductive like raven queen who

(09:43):
can turn herself into a raven with a magic ring.
There's a there's a crash spaceship and it's pilot is
Wilford Brimley, who so it's a it's a true that
that's tremendous film too, but only the first one has
a giant spider and finally a more recent giant spider.
Not two giants, but giant enough to be disturbing. If
anyone out there is currently watching the latest season of

(10:05):
Black Mirror on Netflix, the second episode, I believe is
is wonderful horror Halloween viewing, and does include a scene
with a monstrous spider, But I say, I'm gonna have
to check that out this weekend. Anyway, I wanted to
move on to the next thing, which is that today

(10:26):
we are going to be talking about people getting eaten
by giant spiders. But uh, I want to frame this
with a reminder that it is simply wrong in my
point of view to contribute to global spider panic, and
I will not allow us to contribute to global spider panic,
even if only by accident. Spiders are not your enemy.

(10:46):
If you're a human and the spider is a normal
sized spider, that's not you know, at least ten times
bigger than the biggest spider could ever get. Spiders are
are not something to worry about. They generally pose no
threat to humans, with the small exceptions of a few
species that even those are not something you should really
worry about. There's no good reason you need to go

(11:07):
around squashing spiders, and in fact, you would probably find
a world without spiders utterly intolerable. They make it okay
for us to live on this planet. Now, now, Joe,
I know some people are thinking right now and maybe
even writing the email. They're gonna say, Hey, what about
the black woodow spiders and the brown reclusives that live
in my shed? Should I not kill those on site?

(11:28):
Should I allow those? Why do you need to kill them?
I don't know. I mean a lot of people would
argue that is saying, I this is my shed, this
is where I go to get my tools. I don't
want to grab a hoe and then have a black
woo spider stingy. Well, I don't know're not sting me
rather but bite me? Sting still with his little stick

(11:50):
to my brain. I mean, I guess I can't argue
with what you do in your shed, but but I
I don't. We do not want to push an anti
spider message here. Spy piers, spiders perform essential services for
human beings and really all the other creatures on Earth.
I would say one of the primary things is insectivorous services.
So spiders are primary predators that prey on insects. Imagine

(12:15):
a world in which the primary control on insect populations
is gone. You know, we've just squashed them all because
we didn't like the way they looked, or we were
afraid of them, or something like that. I found one
article that interviewed the arachnologist Norman I. Platinik, who works
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
which is probably the coolest place I went this year.

(12:36):
Um and Platinum speculates that if spiders were to disappear
from the Earth, it's likely that human beings would face famine.
He says, without spiders, all of our crops would be
consumed by these pests, the pests that are primarily controlled
by spider predation. So it's hard to know for sure
what would happen in these weird hypothetical scenarios with ecology,

(12:57):
but I think that's a pretty safe bet to uh.
And you know, when it comes back to come back
to black widows for instance, sure you don't want to
be they become bitten by one, but that black widow
is there because their insects to eat, so she's doing
a service. And if you're concerned about their being an
imbalance here with too many black widows around, then I

(13:19):
think one possible solution would be just don't knock down
those dirt daver wasp nests because they in turn prey
on the spiders are that bring them back to their
nests anyway for their their brood to emerge from and consume.
So allow the web of life to work itself exactly exactly,
and the wasp nous of life to work it I
must add too, as in accordance with the research that

(13:42):
I that I was working on for this episode, even
most black widow spider bites today do not result in death. Like,
you don't want to be bitten by a black widow,
but if you get if you get a black widow bite,
seek medical attention, you will probably be all right. I
think I read that since nineteen seventy it's been like
one scent or less of people bitten by black widows

(14:02):
end up dying. And I think I've also read that
every night the average person consumes twenty seven black widow
spiders just in the course of sleeping. The crawl right
in there. That is a true fact. That's where we
get essential vitamins and minerals. All right, So, what are
some other reasons that we should keep the old arachnets around? Well,
beyond the fact that animals deserve to live for their

(14:23):
own sake, they are useful to us for plenty of
other reasons. Spiders have a lot of biommetic technological uses
that people are learning more and more about all the time.
One of the things would be their silk, for example. Yeah, indeed,
we we have to have an older episode that they
just rolls through all the various ways and reasons that
we're trying to steal the secret of the silk. And really,

(14:46):
I mean it goes back to ancient mythology to um,
was it Arachney who lost the bet? A weaving bet
with the gods or looming? I guess we're using a loom,
but at any rate, Uh, Yeah, the silk of the
spider is an amazing material, a true meta material. Um.

(15:06):
They have special glands that secrete silk proteins dissolved in
a water based solution, and the spider pushes the liquid
solution through long ducts. These ducts leaved him lead to
microscopic spigots on the spiders spinnerets, spigots. Don't you wish
you had spigots and and uh and generally there are
two or three spinner at pairs located at the rear

(15:28):
of the abdomen. Furthermore, each spigot has a valve that
controls the thickness and speed of the excruted material. So
the idea here is that when we're talking about the
silk of a spider, it's not just that they have
a little spool of thread in there, or that it's
just you know, a silly string type situation. There is
a manipulation of these of these proteins and the there's

(15:52):
a an actual weaving that takes place. They're forming a
material and they act The exact form of the material
will vary depending on what they're using the silk for.
I mean, even with with one spider individual, they may
may be producing various versions of the product depending on
what they needed for. So as the biggts pulled silk

(16:12):
molecules or spidrons out of the duct out of the
ducts and extrude them into the air, the molecules are
stretched out and linked together and they form these long strands,
and the the spinnerets wind these strands together to form the
sturdy silk fiber okay um. Most spiders have multiple silk
glands which secrete different types of silk material optimized for

(16:34):
those different purposes. So by winding different silk varieties than
together in varying proportions, spiders can form a wide range
of fiber materials, and they can also vary fiber consistency
by adjusting the biggests to form smaller or larger strands.
So they're they're true marvels. I mean, it's not just
that the material is great, but just their manipulation of

(16:55):
it and their creation of it like they are. There's
just a level of of of engineering and production going
on with with the spider that you know, most people
take completely for granted. And of course the silk is
very interesting. As I mentioned a mintigo to engineers for
like material science purposes to study this to see, you know,
can we make something like this at a larger scale

(17:16):
that would be useful in building our structures and technology. Yeah,
because it's it's like a perfect material. It's it's strong,
but it's flexible. Um. It's organic in nature, so you
can use it in various bio medical properties. You can
use it. There are a lot of potential applications and
artificial limbs, artificial tissues, artificial tissues, scaffolding. UM. Have also

(17:40):
read possible for parachuting, like really anywhere you could use
a really remarkable, strong but flexible material. Uh, spider silk
has a potential place and spider evolution perfected it and
we just were biomemetics are just catching up with it,
you know. I have also read many stories over the
years about using spider venom for medical purposes. One story

(18:03):
in particular I remember was about using it to treat
erectile dysfunction. Is that correct? This is correct? Um? And
And if anyone's like, oh, spider venom, I mean really,
when you look at at medicines, the vast spectrum of
medicines that we we we take from the natural world
in a large part we're making use of poisons and venoms,

(18:24):
you know, just figuring out what does this poison or
venom do, and how can we interact with it at
the appropriate dosage, of the appropriate level, How can we
exploit those properties for our benefit. So in this case,
let's talk to a second about erectile dysfunction. Existing erectile
dysfunction drugs manipulate valves controlling blood flow into the penis,

(18:44):
but they don't always work. In fact, they don't work
on one out of every three men who require any
D drug. So we send in the spider. Specifically, we
spend in the Brazilian wandering spider, also known as the
banana spider. UH. They however, rarely crawl on bananas, which

(19:04):
you know that will make sense to just a second here.
So these are five inch or thirteen centimeter arachnids. They
carry a venom that can cause pain, swelling, increased heart rate,
and also preappism, which is a condition that affects those
blood flow valves that already talked about. UH, And this
results in an erection that can last for more than
four hours, is usually painful, and may happen without sexual arousal.

(19:28):
So we're talking about blood potentially coagulating and clotting inside
of the erection. That's how dire situation is. So obviously
that's nothing that one wants for oneself, but it's a
great example. Here's the venom. We see that it's interacting
with this area. Uh, that is that is vital for
erectile drug creation. Like, there's a lot of money to

(19:49):
be made in manipulating those valves, and so a lot
of research has already gotten into this. The researchers work
to identify the natural derived chemicals in the venom that
might be taken advantage up and so far they found
that p n t X two six is the active
compound in the wandering spider venom, and it's essentially a
biological version of viagra. It even appears to have fewer

(20:11):
side effects than existing E D drugs. Uh. However, to
conduct a proper trial, you have they have to be
able to replicate the stuff in large enough quantities. And
this is a situation we get into with both spider
venom and with spider silk. Spiders are very difficult to farm. Yeah,
I remember reading a story years ago about people who

(20:34):
were weaving a garment out of spider silk. They were
taking these uh or or weaving spiders at the Madagascar
or somewhere uh and harvesting their silk in order to
weave this dress. That that sounds like a crazy project
to me. I'm not sure if that's well advised, but anyway,
I think they had to keep capturing and then releasing

(20:55):
the spiders over and over uh in order to harvest
their silk, because you can't just keep them, right. Yeah,
it's not like a silk warrant worm, where where we
have a silk producing uh insect that we have that
we have domesticated and warped over time into just a
you know, pure silk creating organism. But with spiders, most

(21:15):
of them are territorial carnivores. They're highly aggressive against anything,
especially their own kind. There are social spiders that exist,
and these are actually these are actually pretty interesting. I
hadn't done a lot of reading about them before that.
They're not quite use social in the manner of bees
or ants, not team players, right, they don't have casts

(21:36):
or anything. They're no work or spiders, etcetera. But they
do cooperate in the rearing of young and the acquisition
of food. UH. That that being said, most of the
spiders that people seem to be looking at to potentially
farm are not social spiders. Uh So anyway, either way
you look, you shake it. Though, way too much work
would go into any attempt to raise spiders uh in

(21:57):
little individual enclosures, and you would still get only a
limited amount of spider venom or spider or spider silk
out of the the the effort. So it sounds like
you'd want to find another way to produce this stuff, right,
You want genetically modified spider silk or spider venom, And
in fact, that's what's led to, for instance, the creation

(22:18):
of the Blessed Goats spider hybrid, which we've covered on
this show before. I believe where you let's make a
let's let's tinker with the genetics, let's create a goat
that essentially milks uh spider silk. That's the wonders of
our modern age. So that is where researchers have been
looking with with the spider venom of our banana spider.

(22:42):
In two thousand fourteen, researchers successfully created a recombin vaculo
virus with the p n t X two six gene
and then they use this to infect a culture of
caterpillar cells, which produced the spider toxin. However, human trials
are still years away. But this would be the shape
of futuristic corrections, just just letting in shaped. Yeah, well

(23:06):
not spider shaped. Uh though, I get one can't help.
But you know that you have your sort of sci
fi horror lights go off when you start hearing about
about erect out as function drugs that are made from
from spider venom um. But I think it'll be I
think it'll be fine. Yeah, I've seen also research about
using spider venom in uh in anti pain medication, essentially

(23:28):
in analgesix. So there was a study I found in
the British Journal of Pharmacology which indicated that quote spider
venoms are a rich natural source of h in A
V one point seven inhibitors that might be useful leads
for the development of novel analg six. So the creation
of new pain killers out of naturally existing proteins and

(23:49):
stuff that are found in spider venoms. All right, So
I guess the take home here is that spiders are
high level produced. There. Their high level is the earns,
their high level weavers um. They have a mastery here
in these crafts that humans are severely lack. All we
can do is try and steal their secrets. And we're

(24:10):
still trying to steal their secrets. So we certainly should
not wipe them out because there's still so much to
learn from them, of course, and that that's only the
mercenary appeal to your self interest and in gaining new technologies.
I want to say for the record again, spiders deserve
to be here on this earth just like you do.
But okay, so back to the giant spider. I was

(24:33):
eaten by a giant spider. Well, what does the word
giant mean? There? I guess we should determine what we
have in mind. Now. We could start by looking at
what are the biggest spiders occurring in nature? I know
some of you at home are already trembling and hearing
about this news, but uh, there are a couple of

(24:54):
ways you could measure this right. One way would be
by mass. What is the heaviest spider ocurring in nature?
And I think the answer on that is is pretty solid.
There there is a pretty much universal agreement that the
answer is the theraphos of Blondie, commonly known as the
goliath bird eater. That they might be a bit of
a misnomer because it doesn't seem like they primarily prey

(25:17):
on birds. I think this comes from some you know,
nineteenth century illustrations and stuff like that. But uh, like
I said, there's no evidence that they regularly eat birds,
but they might on occasion. The spider can weigh about
six ounces or a hundred and seventy grams. That's heavy.
That is the weight of more than three standard sized

(25:39):
Snickers bars or exactly five fun sized Snickers bars. Hold
five fun sized Snickers bars in your hand. That's how
much the spider can weigh. I'm glad we're not eating
those in our sleep. I've heard I've heard stories that
you can hear these things walking. They'll walk you their

(25:59):
footfall balls makes sounds. Uh. Now, of course, they mostly
prey on other arthropods, but they have been known to
eat small vertebrate animals every now and then. But there's
another way you could measure the largest spider, and that
would be by leg span. Right, what's the biggest what's
the biggest spider in circumference sort of looking down from above, Well,

(26:20):
it appears to be the giant huntsman spider with legspan
of up to twelve inches or thirty centimeters, often described
as being quote the size of a dinner plate that
shows up a lot. Yeah, because you know, that's a
wonderful image, the idea of setting down and here's a
living spider just spread out across your tinner plate. Well
it also, yeah, it suggests that it's literally on the
plate in your home. It's replaced your food somehow, or

(26:43):
the chef has gone mad and decided it is live
spiders for tenner um. Now, whe where do you find it?
You find this particular specimen and warm climates around the world, Asia, Australia,
South America, Africa. They're pretty fast even with their size.
They live under a loose bark on trip our bark
of trees and rocks in crevices under foliage. And they're

(27:05):
actually a rather social spider um, to go back to
what I mentioned earlier, and dozens of them will sometimes
sit together on dead trees or stumps, as opposed to
the sort of typical predatory, loner vibe of a spider
where it's like, if I see anybody that even looks
like me, I'm gonna eat them, even if theyre might mate. Well,
spiders just know not to pass up a good meal. Yeah, okay,

(27:27):
So so that's about as big as things get in nature.
And even those are pretty rare exceptions. These are the
biggest of the biggest. Obviously, that's not going to do it, right,
These spiders don't really represent a threat to humans even
though they're the biggest. So how big should our model
spider be to match the Roger Corman movie proportions? Well,

(27:48):
then this we get back to some some previous discussions
we've had about the morphological limits of giant creatures because
you end up going up against two things, Right, what
is technically pop stable from like a mad science this,
you know, raising giant spiders in his basement, versus like,

(28:08):
what is the largest thing that is sustainable? That the
largest thing that is effective in the in the battle
for survival, because you know, it needs to work. It's
like a business, right, if it's it needs to it
needs to be an effect, have an effective economic flow
to it, otherwise it's not going to survive. And you know,
one way to look at it this we always we

(28:30):
always go in this direction. When he's saying, all right,
how called large, told this animal be well, how large
are they now? We've already answered that how large have
they been in the past. There was a time where
we thought that the largest spider to ever live was
a prehistoric um Um mega acne with a body length
of three nine millimeters or a little over a foot.

(28:50):
But paleontologist eventually figured out that this was a sea scorpion,
not a spider. And if you the actual fossil spiders
that we have are pretty disappointing. They're pretty small. So
we kind of get into the you know, whale territory
here where we say, well, actually the largest specimens that
we know of are what we have today. Yeah, I

(29:12):
I mean we've talked about this before. We talked about
this in our Science of Human Height episode. We had
a brief digression on on how large insects and spiders
and stuff like that can get. There seemed to be
a lot of limits on on the size of these creatures,
on arthropods with exoskeletons, that their their bodies are just
not designed to keep getting much bigger like nobodies are

(29:33):
really and it comes that we often talk about King Kong,
right like King Kong the Guerrilla as just a giant gorilla,
his legs would snap because those of a die of
heat exhaust. Yet, yeah, like that form is not is
not designed or you know, or did not evolve to
to to work at greater scales. And the same thing

(29:55):
is true of insects. Like in an insect level, having
an exoskeleton is fabulous because you gives you protection. It's
a lightweight um and then you tend to be rather
strong creatures too. But but they're working at a different
scale and when you start start scaling that up, you
run into problems of Okay, is the instance, a giant
spider the size of a dump truck or something probably

(30:17):
wouldn't be able to move. She shilab would probably not
be able to move if you just just immediately like magically, Honey,
I shrunk the kids scaled one up to a giant size.
And then on top of that, all right, you're gonna say,
well what if it just grew over time, Well, you're
gonna you have to remember that exoskeletons don't grow. Exoskeletons
have to be shed. You have to multiple Yeah, so

(30:39):
it's like soft shell crabs, et cetera. The thing is,
if you have a sufficiently large invertebrate. Then okay, it
has this this this giant exoskeleton, and it's hard and
it's rough, but somehow it's able to live with this thing.
Maybe maybe it's an immobile giant spider and like villagers
worship it and bring it, you know, virgins, a drain

(31:00):
or something. Okay, that's great, But then what happens when
that giant god spider has to mold. Well, then conceivably
it might have mold out of its exo skeleton and
then its body would just collapse and fall apart because
it didn't have They no longer had an exo skeleton
supported it's mass. It's just too excessive. Yeah, I mean,
it's like trying to imagine, um, I don't know. Uh,

(31:22):
I'm coming up with a horrible exain. Here's here's what
I tried to think of, like a you know, uh,
twenty ft wide pumpkin or cantalope or something. It's just
this is not a sustainable size. I always come back
to economics. It's like thinking of, all right, what would
it be I have a great lemonade stand? What have
I had a lemonade stand that could feed the entire country.

(31:44):
What if I had a McDonald's restaurant that could that
could actually feed an entire continent, or in feed they'll
feed the world. Those are just ridiculous ideas because the
form can't get people in the door. Yeah, it just
does not does not work. You're you're talking, You're talking nonsense.
And it's a more thing like a lemonade stand that feeds,
that gives lemonade to an entire country, is like a

(32:05):
spider the size of a building. Right, Okay, so we've
established why in an environment with our atmospheric pressure and
Earth gravity and all that kind of stuff, you would
never see a giant spider. It just wouldn't happen. Now,
in a weightless environment, genetically modified the giant spiders, I
think there's a lot of potentially Okay, maybe that's not bad.

(32:25):
But but let's just roll with it. Okay, we're we're
going to Roger Corman Land. Just pretend we can ignore
all that stuff and say we do have a spider.
I don't know the size of a van or how
big would a spider have to be to prey on
a human? Uh, depending on you know, it's it's predatory
strengths on its venom and stuff like that. It probably

(32:48):
wouldn't even have to be the size of a van, right, Yeah,
I was thinking about this and it and also I
kept running through my mind me and my son watching
a blackwood a spider on a vacation Arizona, watch it
try and catch a grasshopper in its web, and thinking
about those the size comparisons there. I think a large spider,

(33:09):
like a hunting spider the size of a dog would
be pretty pretty impressive, but not maybe not so large
that you would really run into a lot of just
real severe morphological limits. Okay, kind of like the dog
costumes you see where the round Halloween where the dog
is wearing a spider costume. Maybe not a puppy size spider,

(33:31):
but like a moderate size, too large, dog size spider. Yeah,
I would think so, you know, and if they're especially
that creature is hunting the humans with stealth as opposed
to you know, magic web. But then that's the other thing.
If scaling up the scaling up the web is an
entirely different kettle of fish. But but yeah, I think
a dog sized spider would be able to do it. Okay,

(33:53):
so that's our lower limit. Let's say, on the other hand,
we can keep in mind the possibility of of a
you know, moving ock sized spider or a van sized
spider that we'll we'll just have those floating in our mind. Okay,
we won't ask a lot of questions of them, but
we'll just have them there. All right. Well, let's take
a quick break and when we come back we will

(34:13):
discuss how they get you. All right, we're back now, Robert.
We have to talk about how these spiders catch you.
Oh yeah, well, there there are so many different species
of spiders. There's so many different hunting strategies that are

(34:34):
utilized by spiders. The most familiar is going to be
the web. But even with the web, there are multiple types,
so you have just to roll through them real quick.
You have orb webs, the most common typical spider web.
You have triangular webs as well. You have funnel spiders
and then make sheets of silk and then wrap them
up in to make these funnel shapes. So the funnels

(34:55):
have one big opening to catch prey, and they also
have one small opening in the back in case the
spider and needs to escape, so it's not sticky, but
the spider can easily move through them. This is its
home turf, this is its kill room. Okay, so I
like that idea, Like somebody just wanders into one of
these and they're like, what the heck is this giant cone?
I don't know. No, oh goodness, there's a hunting spider

(35:16):
on the ceiling. And then they got it. Yeah. The
most common web traps we think of are these flat
ones that orb webs. But another one is the three
dimensional traps, right, yeah, yeah, they're take for instance, cobweb spiders,
so they make small, just random messes of silk string
that are attached to their surroundings by a long string.

(35:36):
There are mesh web spiders that make webs that are
similar to cobweb spiders that they have a little more structure,
and they're just really found in small, messy webs at
the tips of vegetation, especially in grassy fields. They can
also be found under stones and dead leaves. In the
human scenario, maybe they would show up I don't know,
in the restrooms of strip clubs, or the or the

(35:56):
restrooms of of gas stations. I'm thinking just the restroom
in general. A dirty restroom is a great place to
find a giant broom stall what is the perfect place
to get you? Yeah? Um, I love that as the
tagline for the resulting movie. Here sheet web spiders. They
make many kinds of webs that are formed out of

(36:16):
sheets of silk, and the sheets are widely wildly jumbled
together and they don't have many large gaps. There's also
an interesting sheet web spider type bowl and doily spiders.
They make really interesting structures, essentially an inverted dome shaped
web or bowl suspended over a horizontal sheet web or
doily spiders hang on the underside of the dome and

(36:38):
they attack the prey. So we're talking about with some
rather impressive structures. Now here's what I'm wondering if we
scaled that up, and again, with all of the reasons
that would probably never happen in nature, But if we
just imagine scaling it up, would we would we actually
stumble into webs? I mean, are the success of webs
sort of depending on the lack of sensation of insects

(37:02):
or something? Do you do you kind of have to
be a little bit dumber than the standard primate in
order to end up in a spiderweb. Well, I think
it's interesting to think in terms of the funnel spiders
that already mentioned in that part of this trick is
creating an alien environment that the spider has maximum control over.
So it's how you know, you might be dumb to

(37:25):
wander in there, but you're not dumb to not know
your way around this alien Environment's like walking into a
zenomorph five right, or into you know, a derelict alien
spaceship and not knowing which way we're to walk and
what to do. Um that whatever lives there and eats
there is going to have the advantage. Well, the kill
room analogy you had is a good one. It's also
like at the end of Silence of the Lambs when

(37:47):
when Joe Foster goes into Buffalo Bill's house exactly exactly
like that and then even more complixate the drop on her. Yeah,
he's got the drop, but imagine if he also had
a decoy involved as well. What because there there are
these spiders known as sly closest spiders and they create
a double of themselves. They they they essentially craft a

(38:09):
large spider from leaves, debris, and dead insect parts. Have
it in the web. Yeah, in this way, you know,
confuses predators specifically, So if the spider is disturbed, it
vibrates its body but once so it's primarily defensive technique
against things that want to eat the spider. But I
guess that would also be true if you had random

(38:29):
Jodie Foster's random Clarice starlings wandering into your kill room
and trying to apprehend you. Well, yes, I mean, Buffalo
Bill does have to defend himself against Jodie Foster. She
was there to catch him, and she has a gun.
But of course the trap stone in there. Do they
Oh no, no, they get rather complicated, especially when you
start looking at trap door spiders. Can you imagine this

(38:51):
on the human scale to scale? Ups wandering along some
dry ground and suddenly the ground under you shifts. What's happening?
I know? Yeah, this is perfect, this is um I
guess to put this in horror movie terms as well,
this would be like a a Saw movie kind of thing.
I can't think of anything else recent where anyone's actually
busting out a trap door. Uh you know, it used

(39:13):
to be the standard Bond villain thing. But yeah. Trap
door spiders prey on larger terrestrial anthropods and even occasionally
on small lizards. They build tube like tunnels in the
sides of banks, in disturbed areas, along natural insect walkways.
They dig the tunnel, reinforce it with a mixture of
earth and saliva, then a layer of silk, and then

(39:34):
there's a door. So there are two types. There's the
cork tight door, which is thick and fitted. The other
is a wafer type door, which is a sheet of
silk and dirt. Both are silk hinged. So they're really
creating a rather complex structures here. Now, some species keep
it simple, others craft branching tunnels with multiple doors. The
species also differ as to whether the tunnels are simple

(39:55):
or branching with multiple doors. So I guess it's not
so much a jigsaw kind of scenario, and that you're
falling in, but something is in there, uh, in its
little disguised k ready to jump out and get you.
That is classic horror movie fodder. That's that's good stuff.
But also, uh, we should talk about the other types
of spider predation. Now, of course, all spiders produce silk,

(40:17):
but not all of them use it to spin structures
with it. Some of them make I don't know what
would you even call it, more like a weapon with it.
So how how about the Bullos spider. Oh yeah, they
hunt by using a sticky capture blob of silk at
the end of a line, which scientists called bulas. And
if you see video of this, they actually spin it
around like a lasso, like it'll be hanging from a web,

(40:39):
spinning this line of silk around in the air and
then snagging them off with it. So, yeah, that's a
great example. It's using it like a like a grappling
hook or like like scorpions, Harpoon and Mortal Kombat. Right, Oh,
that's good. And then on top of that, you have
net casting spiders as well. When the prey approaches, the

(40:59):
spider will stretch the net two or three times it's
relaxed size, and then propel itself onto the prey, entangling
it with the web. So these would be like the
kind of like the gladiators with the trident. I guess
uh in uh in gladiatorial combat. Oh, would they have
like the net like the fisherman styleators? Right? They got
a net in a pokeia and in some sometimes there

(41:20):
are some spiders of this type that have an extra
technique that they used to help them pick out their prey.
At night. This is pretty ingenious. So you have a
particular species of the spiders that, in addition to any
kind of structure they may have built, they'll also uh
spray feces on the ground which will dry white, and
then any dark animal that has to run across it,

(41:40):
they're gonna stand out. Oh, I still get them. So
there's so many levels of of not only utilizing traps,
but really maximizing the environment, creating a keep coming back
to the kill zone in the kill room example, creating
a custom eyed environment that they have total mastery of.
Yet again, it's hard to imagine exactly what this would
be like scaled up to monster movie size spiders. I

(42:03):
don't know if it really translates, right, I Mean, it's
yet another one of those things where sometimes it's hard
to fit this to our to our weird premise. A
lot of this stuff seems to work on the small scale.
Uh Like, I don't know would would would would spring
the ground with fcs work for for a giant one
of these things? I mean, I guess we just have
to stay in the light, right I guess? And you know,

(42:25):
would a large spider to prey on humans have to
get even more inventive. Would it actually use its webbing
and it's decoys to create like an entire, entirely functional
um rest stop to create a party with free beer.
It's like, sorry, it's all spider silk. You don't know.
Do you go to drink it? Yeah? So there are
lots of methods of spider predation that obviously involves silk

(42:48):
in one way or another, creating traps and stuff like that.
But there's also the much older, simpler, more universal hunting
tactic where they just chase you down, Just run you down, bite, bite,
and subdue. Yeah, maybe jump out from behind a tree
or something. But so I was wondering about the speed
of spiders. Try to imagine we've got the scaled up
spider again, ignoring all the physics constraints, how fast would

(43:12):
it move if it moved relative to its speed on
the ground. The answer is hilarious. So, so I wanna
reference that. There's some papers on spider gate characteristics and
and running speed among spider species that are like these
grass funnel web spiders. Hololena is the genus, and research

(43:34):
has shown that under experimental conditions, a couple of species
of funnel web spinning spiders and the whole landa genus
can perform sprints occasionally faster than about fifty centimeters per second,
which works out to about seventy body lengths per second
for these spiders. Now, imagine if you could sprint up

(43:54):
to seventy body lengths per second. If you're six ft tall,
that's a hundred three cimeters. That means if you could
move as fast as this spider relative to your own
body size, you would be able to move a hundred
and twenty eight meters per second. That's about one point
for American football fields per second. Now, if you imagine

(44:16):
a predator that could kill you could sprint up to
seventy body lengths per second. If our giant spider has
I don't know, a ten meter body length and can
sprint seventy body lengths per second, that's seven d I
mean that obviously that's not going to happen in reality,
but these things would be able to chase you down
in ways that are unbelievable to the human mind. Oh wow, Yeah,

(44:39):
it's it's hard to even imagine how that would scale up.
The best I can do is to try and imagine
it taking place in like a tensent dragons tiled map
the grid and even then that's a ridiculous amount of speed.
Why would you have that many grid squares battlefield that big?
It's unmanageable. Contact your d m okay, So other fun

(45:01):
adventures in predation. There is one family of spiders that
I love, known as the labor a day the Allobrids.
Oh yeah, these guys are great because they they actually
crush you. And I say you, I'm speaking of course
to small insects, but they crushed their prey with their webbing.
They wrap them up and essentially a body crushing iron

(45:23):
maiden of silk. Yeah, there's a species particularly we've read about,
the philip Pinella of Assinna And yeah, they have this
method of wrapping you in silk that is so tight
that your body structures are crushed. In word, they say
that the legs snap that like the eyes buckle in.

(45:44):
It's it's pretty ground it. It reminds me of I
think there's a scene in color Clowns from Outer Space
where they utilize some sort of silly string contraption that
works like this. But but yeah, the researchers have apparently
observed these spiders spending a hundred times as much effort
over an hour to wrap a prey in eighty meters
of silk. So that's two d and sixty two feet,

(46:06):
which seems crazy. Yeah, that that's not scaled to what
we're talking about. That's just like the tiny spider. Yeah,
producing that much silk to to wrap the prey this type.
And actually I've got some more interesting stuff about how
the species eats in a bit. But so one reason
they need to do this is because these are actually

(46:27):
not venom producing spiders, that's right. They don't have the
powerful bite. So what do they gotta do? What do
they how do they start softening up their prey to consume.
They have to drool all over it. But you have
a strate jacket, tighten it as much as possible, and
then begin the vomiting. That seems to be the predominant
theory is that they basically they know they're gonna have

(46:47):
to drool over this stuff, so they want as small
a target as possible. It's just go ahead and crunch
it all up, make something small, so I'm conserving my
spider drool. Okay, well, let's get more into the details
of how they drool on you. And uh, that's maybe
even the nice way of putting it of what would
happen to you as the eating process actually begins. Now, first,

(47:09):
I guess we start with you being immobilized. You've been
caught in a trap by a trapdoor spider, in a web,
in a in a silk lasso, or you've just been
chased down and bitten. Uh. One of the things that's
gonna happen with pretty much all spiders except the labor
day and another genus known as or not genus another family.
I think the the hul archad today is that they're

(47:31):
all gonna have venom. And the venom glands are attached
to ducts that travel down the length of the collissarae,
and those are the mouth part structures right like the fangs.
You are attached to the end of the collissarae. And
then the ducts come down to a hole at the
tip of the collissarol fang, and they'll hit you with

(47:53):
that and rapidly contract their muscles to eject this cocktail
of venom into you. Now, the venoms vary from species
to species, and the venom cocktail is generally well, it's
a cocktail, it's heterogeneous. Right, So it means they contain
multiple different toxins and different chemicals doing different jobs. So
a common spider toxin is going to be a neurotoxic polypeptide.

(48:16):
It's a chain of amino acids that attacks the nervous system. Uh,
and the prey can expect to experience some distressing systemic
effects and paralysis. But different spiders are gonna gonna hit
you with different venoms. There, They're gonna be different things.
You'd have to expect. We can't. There's no one size
fits all. But from this stage it's generally going to
be on to the eating. All Right, we're gonna take

(48:38):
a quick break and when we come back, we will
be consumed. Alright, we're back. The spiders have captured us,
and now they're going to consume us. Right, So the
spider has you immobilized, perhaps wrapped in a cocoon of silk,

(48:59):
may be subdued with a venomous bite, and the purpose
of the venom is to subdue and paralyze the prey.
I've read that the fact that it often kills the
prey is technically an unnecessary side effect. Plus, we should
keep in mind that venom is designed to work primarily
against the spiders major food source, which is arthropods other
invertebrate insects. So you are not an arthropod unless you are,

(49:23):
in which case we're preparing Earth for your arrival. But
when the spider starts to eat you, you a mammal,
I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe you'd still
be alive and paralyzed, you might be dead. It's hard
to say. It kind of comes down to did this
thing evolved to prey on humans? How? Atomic radiation? Robert? Yeah,

(49:45):
but that's the thing, Like it's a it's a tool
for a particular particular purpose. And unless you're dealing with
some other worldly environment where humans and giant spiders have
co evolved for this relationship, it's gonna be a little uncertain.
It's to be a little off exactly right. So how
does it start to eat you? Well, generally spiders consume

(50:07):
a liquid diet. But I'm not a liquid, Robert, or
you a liquid I'm mostly liquid. But you know, I
mean if I were to go and eat you, you
would not you. I mean, your body has lots of
liquids in it, incorporated into cell structures, you can have
a lot of valid stuff. Yeah, So so something's going

(50:27):
to have to happen here. So what's going to happen
is that the spider begins to vomit on you. This
can happen in a couple of different ways, which we'll
get to in a moment. But the essential processes that
the spider ejects digestive fluids onto you, and these digestive
fluids contain enzymes. Uh, the fluids are truly caustic. And

(50:47):
here's one example to illustrate, which I thought was fascinating
from a study in the Journal of a Racknology. So
we're gonna go back to the lubri day. The spiders
that don't have their own venom glans, right, and they
crush you with that silk structure. So, uh, this is
the same species we mentioned earlier, the Filipinella vicinna. They

(51:09):
usually pose on their web in a strange posture if
you've ever seen this. They keep their legs folded in
against the body. And it's been hypothesized that the reason
they pose in the web like this is to avoid
visually signaling predators. So there might be a bird that
wants to eat spiders or something. It knows what a
spider looks like. But if you don't pose in a

(51:31):
way that gives away the fact that you're a spider,
the burden might not recognize you as prey um. But
when the elaborated begins to eat, it does something strange.
It gets out of its regular posture and spreads its
anterior legs or the front legs wide apart. It holds
them way back. Why does it do that? Well, the

(51:52):
authors of the study point out that, you know, the
spider's method of eating this illobred is to rapids prey
in this ridiculously tight amount of silk, compress it into
a compact package like a garbage compactor, and then just
vomit all over the entire thing. So most spiders are
going to take a slightly different route where they eject
these digestive enzymes through a small hole in the shell

(52:15):
of the prey insect or over a small surface at
a time when they're eating not pivicina. This will just
slather the entire thing. Essentially, it's making a huge mess.
So the researchers asks, huh, I wonder if the spider
it's is holding its anterior legs away from this mess,
because the same digestive enzymes it's using to dissolve its

(52:38):
prey would also dissolve its own body, and their research
found bingo, that does appear to be what's happening. The
authors found that the spider's digestive enzymes, when applied to
detached legs from the same spiders species, uh, they caused
the set a, meaning the bristles, to fall off of
the legs, and they also cause damage to the intersegment

(53:00):
mental membranes between the different parts of the legs. So
imagine if you had to eat by so you've got
a plate you're sitting down with, you've got a hamburger
on it, and you have to eat by vomiting Hollywood
acid all over your food. Yeah uh. And then also
that stuff would give you chemical burns if you touched

(53:21):
it with your own hands, so you sort of have
to like vomit all over and then hold your arms
back and slurp it up. But anyway, let's get back
to being the prey. You're not the spider in this scenario.
You're the prey, so obviously you've been immobilized. The spider
starts to apply this digestive fluid to you. Now, obviously,
if you've been attacked by a giant uh P vicinna,

(53:43):
you're gonna be crushed into a tiny ball with a
tight wrapping of silk, so we can basically say it's
lights out. Then the spider will dissolve your entire body
with these enzymes and suck up your liquefying body parts,
holding its legs back in a very dainty fashion as
it does so. Um, but well, what's gonna happen if
it's not this species, if we're dealing with other types

(54:04):
of spiders, And here a lot of my information is
going to come from a really delightful arachnology book called
The Biology of Spiders by rain or Felix. Uh So,
for most types of spiders, feeding differs significantly based on
whether or not the spider has what's called calyssral teeth.
So the spider have the calyscera, you know, these are
the mouth parts that have the fangs at the end

(54:24):
of them. But some spiders have have these these teeth structures,
these sort of grinding surfaces on the inside of them,
and some have very few of these or don't have
these structures at all either way, The general processes that
the spider is going to barf, it's gonna regurgitate some
digestive fluid onto the prey, wait a few seconds for

(54:46):
it to dissolve some tissues, and then it's gonna suck
that liquid back in and then repeat at victori um. Uh.
So what happens when the spiders don't have these teeth
I mentioned the calyssol teeth or have a few of them. Uh.
There are a few families of spiders that are like this.
So there's the terridda day, the comb footed spiders or

(55:07):
tangle web spiders, and this is a big family of
spiders that includes the Latrodectus genus, which are the widows.
And then also we're gonna include the thomisids with your
crab spiders. So these guys work typically by creating a
very tiny hole in the outer shell of the prey,
which they might poke with the calyscera, and then spitting

(55:30):
digestive fluid into the body cavity through the holes. That
makes sense. So you've got an insect with an outer
exoskeleton and you're gonna be stabbing a hole in the
outside and then just putting some of this digestive enzyme
inside through the hole. The process is continued until the
prey is sort of left as a dry empty shell

(55:51):
like the digestive enzymes in and then it sucks some
fluid out. It's kind of reminiscent of some some mummification
techniques have been employed. Really, you're gonna do about all
that nasty stuff inside the creature? Well, you can try
and drain it out, you can try and putrefy it
or what have you. And this is kind of like that. Okay, yeah,
Well you are essentially left with a dried up husk

(56:13):
of a creature which is mummy like and it's and
it's outer appearance at least, so in the end, most
of these interior tissues are going to be dissolved, sucked out,
and delicious. And to me, I I wonder if so,
I was left to wonder what a spider that works
this way would make of an animal with an indoskeleton

(56:34):
rather than an exo skeleton. So does the exo skeleton
work as an important type of container for the process,
if that makes any sense. Would a spider like this
trying to eat a mammal without an exo skeleton be
kind of like if we tried to eat a bowl
of soup without the bowl. Yeah, because it's essentially making

(56:55):
you into a soup inside your own axis skeleton. Right,
So I er, I don't know. Mammals might not be
all that that enticing to spiders like this, but then again,
I don't know. It could be they may find some
way around it. I mean they they have by and
large evolved to prey and eat up eat invertebrates, and

(57:15):
that's their realm of of influence. Yes, and also we're
gonna get to the toothy spiders in a second, but
first I want to hit a myth, Robert. I don't
know if you thought like this when you were a kid.
I definitely thought this when I was a kid, and
I know some people probably do think this, that spiders
suck the juices out of prey animals through their fangs.
Did you think this way? Um? I think I did.

(57:38):
I don't know how much of that was, like directly
due to science text in school or my or if
it had to do with something I picked up elsewhere
and cartoons or something. But vampires, I often think of
vampires this way, or I used to that they would
bite you with their fangs, and then it would be sucking,
not with like the mouth, through the esophagus in the stomach,

(57:58):
but the blood that they drained from me would be
going up through the fangs somehow into a blood receiving system. Anyway,
I think a lot of people think about spiders this way.
This is not the case. That the presence of venom
injecting fangs similar to hypodermic needles in a way, I think,
could be responsible for the mistaken assumption that the fangs
work both ways. But this is not true. That the fluid,

(58:21):
so the fangs inject the venom, but the fluids that
are coming out of the prey animal are coming in
through the mouth parts. The fangs are injectors. The spiders
do consume with a fluid sucking action, but this is
done through a mouth orifice powered by an order by
the by the pharynx, and by an organ known as
the sucking stomach. Like that's great, It's like a pump

(58:45):
that that gets you know, it creates this suction action
that pulls all that delicious fluid up through the mouth
parts and through the pharynx down into the digestive system.
But anyway, back to the spiders that do have the teeth,
So these are the ones that have these grinding surfaces
on their calycera. They perform instead a kind of rudimentary

(59:07):
grinding action with these surfaces. So in science we refer
to this as a mastication. It's a great word, but
it just means chewing. Uh. And so these spiders also
do the same thing. Essentially, they work by regurgitating digestive
fluids onto the prey that dissolves the prey tissues and
then slurping up dissolved body tissues. But in the process

(59:28):
they also use these calyssral teeth to chew and mash
the prey animal up into a ball of unrecognizable half
dissolved mush. So they tenderizing and supefying at the same time. Exactly,
They're they're they're creating bullus the same way you actually
do with your mouth. You know, they say when you
chew food in your mouth, you sort of chew into

(59:49):
a chew chewed up mash. This is really grows it
chewed up mashed up ball of food known sometimes as
a bullus, that you then swallow. Yeah. Next, I'm highly
encourage anyone next time you're eating, because I think about
this all the time from an episode we did a
few years back on digestion. But you can, actually, if

(01:00:09):
you're conscious of it, you'll find yourself sitting there chewing
and just feeling as your your mouth automatically liquefies um,
choose up and then forms all of this into a
slurry bolus that then goes down the throat. That's yeah, great,
But but what's it like to be that bolus? That's
that's what we're wondering today. I guess at this point

(01:00:31):
you're probably not aware of what's going on anymore, because
the mastication process um and the dissolving of the digestive
enzymes work together to sort of reduce you to an
unrecognizable ball of gunk. Uh So, you become this mush,
and then they consume you via the old in and
out that we discussed before in the end, leaving behind

(01:00:53):
only sort of indigestible parts like shells or maybe in
some rare cases, bones and feathers. Uh So, these spiders
also have a process for vomiting backup hard in edible
body parts that are accidentally slurped up along with nutritious
dissolved meat from the prey, not unlike an owl. Owls
do that. Owl pellets are an indigestible stuff that they

(01:01:18):
went back up vom. Oh. I always thought those came
out the other end. No, no, no, yeah, these kind
of these come out the mouth. No, yes, spiders actually
they produce pellets. This has been shown in research that
indigestible parts. They so they go down, they go down
the mouth parts and then they get sort of like
I believe, they get sort of caught by these uh,
pharyngeal muscles and by sete again these bristles structures that

(01:01:42):
sort of filter them and catch them. Stuff that's not
good to eat gets sort of bawled up and then
ejected back out. Interesting, delicious, But of course this brings
us back to the question though, what about vertebrates? Yeah,
we are vertebrates. Can we look to examples of spiders
preying on other vertebrates? If there were a giant spider,

(01:02:05):
would it even want to eat us? I mean, would
it just be looking for like, where are the you know,
equally sized insects for me to eat? Obviously, the primary
prey animals of most spiders are going to be other
arthropod invertebrates, mainly insects, But what happens when the food
chain runs backwards? Do spiders ever seemed to eat vertebrates

(01:02:28):
on purpose, even mammals. Yeah, yeah, this does happen. It
doesn't happen that often, but it does happen. One example
I want to look at is a paper by paper
in Plos one by Martin Knifefeller and Miriam Nornschild, and
this was called Bat Predation by Spiders. It's about what

(01:02:50):
you guess it is from the title. They tried to
catalog recorded instances of spider predation on bats. Sometimes a
bat meets an unfortunate and it gets stuck, entangled in
a spider web. Sometimes after that happens, the spider begins
to eat. So the author has judged that in many
of the recorded instances, it looked like what had happened

(01:03:14):
when a bat died in a spiderweb was what they
would call a non predatory death. The bat just got
caught in there, got exhausted or dehydrated or something, and
it died, and the spider didn't even bother feeding on it, didn't.
He probably like he didn't even know what to do
with it right. In other examples, however, they identified what
they thought looked like genuine predation where the spider appeared

(01:03:35):
to attack, kill, and then eat the captured bat. They
also point out that these cases of bat predation, where
it at least seemed to them that the spider was
genuinely preying on the bat, might inform our judgment of
a hypothesis, and this is not necessarily known, but it's
a hypothesis in arachnology, the large rare prey hypothesis. And

(01:03:57):
essentially what this suggests is that while most of the
prey animals that are captured by large orb weaving spiders
are going to be tied little insects of low nutritional
value quote, the occasional catch of large, energetically rewarding prey
may be essential in order to fulfill the reproductive needs

(01:04:18):
of large orb weaving spiders. So, according to this hypothesis,
if it's correct, you've got these spiders that most of
what they catch is just junk, it's insect garbage. Every
now and then they hit the jackpot. And when they
hit the jackpot with a really large insect like a
cicada or something, or perhaps even a mammal like a
bat or a frog or some other small vertebrate. They

(01:04:42):
get this huge nutritional windfall that allows them to have
a much greater chance of reproductive success. Is that kind
of like a criminal of this pulling off a lot
of petty little jobs, but still has to carry off
one big heist every so often to sustain things. It's
like the beginning of the sting, you know, the grifters
or knocking people over for a few bucks here and

(01:05:02):
there by stealing their wallets, until they accidentally steal the
wallet of a guy who's running money for an illegal casino,
and they got these thousands of dollars. But of course
in that scenario, the gangster then comes after them. I
don't know if there's but this underlies the problem of
going after larger prey. Do you see through throughout the
animal kingdom? And that's that, Yeah, the larger prey come

(01:05:24):
with greater risk. You gotta extend more, extend more energy,
possibly risk injuring yourself or even dying at the hands
of the larger prey that you're going after. It's a
it's a risk, but that's that's what that's. Great rewards
come with greater risk, so they do. Yeah, I was
eaten by a giant spider. Okay, so that's what it's

(01:05:52):
like to get eaten by a giant spider. I hope
you enjoyed it, and I and I hope you enjoy
being eaten by a giant spider because they are coming. Yes,
and uh, you know, we this is actually a great opportunity. Uh,
we just started a thing. We're experimenting with, a thing
where we're doing Facebook live videos and looking at trailer
footage from old films. So there might be a possibility

(01:06:15):
here with this episode. Oh, this could be great. We
could look at some some old nineteen fifties Spider Ma trailers. Yeah,
let's check in on our Facebook page and see if
that's happening. Maybe we can make that happen the Friday
after this airs. I just wanted to clarify I was
kidding about the spiders coming by the way, I meant
coming from space. I didn't want to suggest that I
think that we're there evolving in that direction. And some

(01:06:37):
people do listen to this show as they're falling asleep,
so I would hate for that thought to enter into
their vulnerable, uh semi dreaming mind and plant any seeds. Yeah,
we're not here to plant spider seeds in your head.
That's for the twenty seven spiders that crawl into your
mouth each night. Yeah, let me retreat and become responsible
for a moment in my final in my final moments here,

(01:06:58):
I want to remind you yet in spiders or your friend,
they're not your enemy, No reason to fight them. At
number two, there's never gonna be a giant spider on Earth.
All right. Well, hey, if you want to learn more
about this topic or other related topics, heading over to
stuff to Build your Mind dot com. That's the mothership.
That's where we will find all the episodes. You'll find
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(01:07:20):
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(01:07:42):
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