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SPIDER BYTES
AMAZING SPIDER FACTS
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Wherever you are in the world, you are probably within 3 feet of a spider.
Spiders eat 80% of the world’s insects. Without them we would be overrun by bugs.
In the New World tropics as many as 80% of the species are currently unknown to science.
Piaroa Indians of Venezuela enjoy eating toasted tarantulas.
When threatened, most spiders drop and play dead or run. Biting is almost always a last resort.
Generally, the female spiders are bigger than the males.
Legends to the contrary, female spiders rarely eat males after mating.
Spiders have been spotted flying among jets at 15,000 feet.
Spider silks can absorb more energy than any man-made fiber.
Since spider silk is one of the strongest fibers known, the U.S. Army is interested in using spider silk to make, among other things, a more effective bullet-proof vest.
Silk starts as a liquid protein which becomes a solid thread — not because it dries, but because tension reorients the protein molecules.
Spiders on amphetamines make smaller webs. On caffeine, they can’t keep up the orderly pattern. On LSD, they spin exceptionally regular webs, and on valium, they abandon web building altogether.
If you see a spider web it was probably spun by a female. The adult males usually don’t bother! All they want to do is run around and court females.
Of 34,000 known spider species, only a fraction of 1 percent are dangerous to humans. In California the only ones we have to worry about are the Black Widow and the Brown Recluse.
Spiders only eat live food.
Most spiders can fast for a month or more. A large well-fed tarantula can go without food for as long as a year.
Spiders use their feet to taste, smell and hear.
The receptors a spider uses to “see” the world (smells, tastes, sounds, temperature, gravity) are distributed all over its body — many of them look like hairs.
Spiders grow by molting, shedding their exoskeleton when it becomes too tight.
The male European house spider can run the equivalent of a human running the length of 6 football fields in 10 seconds.
In addition to the “hairs” that are sensory organs, others serve purely mechanical purposes. Tarantulas and others have tiny foot hairs that allow them to climb glass walls. Others have hairs which trap bubbles of air that allow them to swim and hunt underwater.