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Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's your neighbor's dad practicing golf on the
Speaker 2: lawn alley. Ward, it's also the lady who's going to
Speaker 2: be on The Tonight Show on Wednesday, May fourteenth. Correct
Speaker 2: your podfather, your internet dad me. I'm taping the Tonight
Speaker 2: Show the very day this episode comes out. And if
Speaker 2: you're here because you saw that, welcome, I'm made a
Speaker 2: spider episode for you. Sometimes on this show we talk
Speaker 2: about bears or psychology, or porcupines or rocks, but today
Speaker 2: it's spiders. So thank you everyone for all of the support.
Speaker 2: Going into this taping tomorrow, I'm excited and my hands
Speaker 2: are sweaty. So first off, I'm going to say, I
Speaker 2: know some of you are very afraid of spiders, and
Speaker 2: we are gathered here today to change that. Okay, we
Speaker 2: can do this. Many psychologists assert that the best cure
Speaker 2: for apprehension and phobias is what's called exposure response prevention.
Speaker 2: So you have to fight fear with knowledge and proximity.
Speaker 2: It works. Listening to this. If you're afraid of spiders
Speaker 2: will make you a stronger person, and it'll make your
Speaker 2: life easier. You got it. And if you're not afraid,
Speaker 2: it's just a great way to fill yourself with facts
Speaker 2: about our tiny little iracanid friends. And side note, this
Speaker 2: episode does not called it rachnology because there are different
Speaker 2: types of iracanids that are not spiders, but the scientific
Speaker 2: distinction for spiders comes from the Greek root erinea, so
Speaker 2: hence raniology. And we have a great one for you.
Speaker 2: He is a professor and researcher at San Diego State
Speaker 2: University and so passionate about spiders. Such a friend to spiders. Also,
Speaker 2: his vibes are like Ron Swanson. He's cool, not a yapper,
Speaker 2: but brimming with love and respect for these maligned and
Speaker 2: fascinating creatures. He's calm, he's collected. He's going to take
Speaker 2: us on a journey. I personally I love spiders and
Speaker 2: I fear them not. But I am holding your hands
Speaker 2: if you do, because it turns out you were brainwashed.
Speaker 2: That's why you're afraid. So I hope you're not. If
Speaker 2: you're listening, I hope you're cool with them. You will
Speaker 2: be in a minute. But first off, there are thirty
Speaker 2: eight thousand known spider species in the world, and about
Speaker 2: one hundred species have venom that's detrimental to humans. So
Speaker 2: that is zero points zero zero two five. So let's
Speaker 2: start there and continue. Okay, but first, thank you so
Speaker 2: much to all the patrons at patreon dot com slash
Speaker 2: ologies for supporting the show for as little as a
Speaker 2: dollar a month and sending in your questions. Thank you
Speaker 2: to everyone wearing ologiesmerch fromologiesmerch dot com, and thank you
Speaker 2: to everyone who leaves a review because they really help
Speaker 2: the show so much and I read them all and
Speaker 2: I prove it to you. So thank you Lady ellentia
Speaker 2: o four, who wrote a review this week that said,
Speaker 2: I've been able to cut my doom scrolling to almost
Speaker 2: nothing because Ologies always keeps me on the edge of
Speaker 2: my seat. Thank you, thank thank you for making this
Speaker 2: space possible. Lady ellent o oh four, Glad you're here,
Speaker 2: happy to do it. I hope you like spiders or
Speaker 2: I hope you fear them because this episode will cure
Speaker 2: a rachtophobia maybe, and if not, you get your money
Speaker 2: back on this free podcast. Speaking of free podcasts, also
Speaker 2: we have shorter g rated versions of our episodes and
Speaker 2: their own feed. Wherever you get podcasts, you can abscribed
Speaker 2: to that. That show is called Smologies. It's also linked
Speaker 2: in the show notes. We made them for delicate years,
Speaker 2: so now, let's get into it ready. I headed to
Speaker 2: San Diego State University to interview this expert who had
Speaker 2: been on my list for years. And it was hot,
Speaker 2: like one hundred degrees, and for some reason, I think
Speaker 2: I was wearing a sweater I can't remember. Parking was
Speaker 2: incredibly confusing, and it was not going well. I'm going
Speaker 2: to set the seed. I'm nearly twenty minutes late to
Speaker 2: this interview. Nightmare. Some of you are very afraid of spiders.
Speaker 2: This is my actual nightmare. It's one hundred degrees two
Speaker 2: twenty four Life Sciences South, so sweaty, and because it's
Speaker 2: one million degrees and I did not want to die,
Speaker 2: I drank like a gallon and a half of water in.
Speaker 3: The way here.
Speaker 2: It was a two hour drive. So here, I am
Speaker 2: not believe how that I have to be. My neck
Speaker 2: feels and smells like a t rex has been licking it. Oh,
Speaker 2: excuse me, excuse me. Do you know where Life Science
Speaker 2: South is? Oh? Do you know where the Life Science
Speaker 2: building is? South? O? Life Science is South? I believe
Speaker 2: it's down there, down there. Yes, I'm not a hundred though, Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm honing in. I'm getting closer at this point, despite
Speaker 2: arriving on campus early, I'm one hour late to his office.
Speaker 2: It's a nightmare.
Speaker 4: I'm looking for Marshall.
Speaker 2: He's a science a spider guy. He's in life science.
Speaker 2: Is South two sixty four?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, okay, thank.
Speaker 2: You so much for the escort.
Speaker 5: Happends all the time.
Speaker 2: Ah, you're an angel. Thank you so much, Marshall. My dad,
Speaker 2: is this heaven?
Speaker 5: A little red in the face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a hundred out there. There are people just
Speaker 2: straight up in bikinis a hundred, if not a little
Speaker 2: bit more. And I talked to Yeah, it's I'm disgusting,
Speaker 2: but that's okay. So I'm so sorry. Can I use
Speaker 2: the ladies who really quick? Okay, you're the best. He
Speaker 2: was so forgiving and very humble and shy and subdued.
Speaker 2: I don't think he had ever heard of ologies or
Speaker 2: realized what he was getting into. Much like a spider
Speaker 2: that you see in your shower, who's like, I'm okay,
Speaker 2: what are you? But relax, chill out, enjoy such dazzling
Speaker 2: information such as what is a true spider versus not
Speaker 2: a true spider? Which are the most advanced spiders, what's
Speaker 2: a spider's vision? Like, which movies get it really really wrong,
Speaker 2: the rarest ones, the tiniest ones, What fieldwork is like
Speaker 2: how learning about these critters is the key to loving them.
Speaker 2: Hidden phone features, mating habits, the oldest Spider, and so
Speaker 2: much more so. Let's hand the mic to professor, researcher,
Speaker 2: spider defender and a raaniologist, Doctor Marshall Hadeen. Can you
Speaker 2: pretend like you're doing karaoke? Just like pretend you're either
Speaker 2: Seinfeld or karaoke Celine Dionne, one of the.
Speaker 5: Two Marshall Hadeen, him Headeen, Hedeen.
Speaker 2: Okay. A lot of people call you Hedden probably, yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: you get that a lot. I'm glad you said it
Speaker 2: because I Hedeen Headen. Okay, perfect? And now do people
Speaker 2: call you doctor Spider ever?
Speaker 5: Rarely?
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah, that's a missed opportunity to be Can I
Speaker 2: call you doctor Spider?
Speaker 5: You can call me doctor Spider? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And you are an a racknologist. I am right, big time,
Speaker 2: big time. What how do you classify just a normal
Speaker 2: arachnologist and a big time one based on the level
Speaker 2: of passion?
Speaker 5: Yes? And I work on different groups of iraknids. If
Speaker 5: you just work on spiders. I mean you're kind of
Speaker 5: sort of an a rachnologist, But if you work on
Speaker 5: spiders and other aracnids, then yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, when you are tasked with defining a spider in
Speaker 2: very technical terms, what do.
Speaker 5: You mean defining a spider like defining a new species?
Speaker 2: No, just literally, what is a spider as opposed to
Speaker 2: another iraknet?
Speaker 5: Spiders have in their fangs, they have venom glands m H.
Speaker 5: And spiders produce silk from their abdomen. That sets spiders
Speaker 5: apart from other.
Speaker 2: Arachnids venom glands and silk.
Speaker 5: That actually makes them the ultimate predator. Venom and silk.
Speaker 2: And let's say that you're talking about daddy long legs.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: Does it irritate you when people call them spiders?
Speaker 5: No? I mean.
Speaker 2: So the daddy long legs that you're used to seeing,
Speaker 2: those may not even be spiders. There are these creatures
Speaker 2: called opilionies, and we are going to exonerate them in
Speaker 2: a moment.
Speaker 5: No, I don't get too upset about it. Okay, so
Speaker 5: there are daddy long legs spiders, okay, which are sellar
Speaker 5: spiders which people find in their cellars. But those are
Speaker 5: spiders and then there are if you go to the
Speaker 5: east coast, you see a little a racknet with a
Speaker 5: little round body and long legs, and people call those
Speaker 5: daddy long legs. Those are apilliones, not spiders.
Speaker 2: And apilliones don't have venomous glands.
Speaker 5: Or so, that's correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and their body segments just one ball of a body.
Speaker 5: That's right. They don't have two part body plan. Yeah.
Speaker 5: But there's another myth because some people think that opilionies
Speaker 5: what they call daddy long legs, are actually highly venomous.
Speaker 5: But that's not true.
Speaker 2: So those slenderman friends that hang out in your shower
Speaker 2: sometimes they're not even spiders and not venomous. So that
Speaker 2: myth that the these non spider daddy long legs are dangerous,
Speaker 2: but they just don't have fangs. The total horsepucky, garbage stalk,
Speaker 2: and even the seller spiders not a threat to your life.
Speaker 5: Well, they don't have venom glands for one thing. But
Speaker 5: even if it was a daddy long legs spider, it's
Speaker 5: not really dangerous either. So myth number one, crushed.
Speaker 2: Flim flambusted spiders technically aren't insects either, or are they insects?
Speaker 2: Not even close not even close to insects. So when
Speaker 2: people say I hate insects like spiders.
Speaker 5: Why would you ever say that?
Speaker 2: But well, I tell me about it. One thing you
Speaker 2: should know about me right off the bat is I
Speaker 2: love bugs. Okay, love bugs.
Speaker 5: This is good.
Speaker 2: I bug collection. My One of my favorite things to
Speaker 2: do before the Internet when I was a kid was
Speaker 2: just pour through field guides of insects. Awesome, I draw them.
Speaker 2: If I see a spider, I will let a crawl
Speaker 2: on me and then rehome it outside. I'm thrill. I
Speaker 2: saw tarantula in the wild last year and it was
Speaker 2: I almost started crying whereabouts. It was in the Santa
Speaker 2: Monica Mountains and I'd never seen one in the wild before.
Speaker 2: Here's some actual audio from this encounter, and it's mortifying
Speaker 2: amounts of glee. That is beautiful. We have trapdoor spiders
Speaker 2: in our backyard.
Speaker 5: Sweet. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I'm the opposite of a person that's like kill
Speaker 2: it with fire. That's why I've been so excited about
Speaker 2: this for so long. Thank god that we established that,
Speaker 2: because you can tell this good man is used to haters.
Speaker 2: What about you? When did you start getting interested in
Speaker 2: bugs as a general category.
Speaker 5: When I was a grad student.
Speaker 2: Really not until then, you weren't out looking for bugs
Speaker 2: and new your kid.
Speaker 5: No, I was outside a lot when I was a kid,
Speaker 5: but a lot, But I was interested in mammals mostly.
Speaker 2: Really we were turned out into a field and told
Speaker 2: to come back when it got dark.
Speaker 5: Yeah that was me too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just like see you later when you smell rice
Speaker 2: a RONI come back.
Speaker 5: That's right, different times, yeah, exactly. Although you can still
Speaker 5: do that up and are Northern California turn loose?
Speaker 2: It's good for the microbiome. Get a tetnis shot, best
Speaker 2: of luck.
Speaker 5: I like it.
Speaker 2: So why mammals when you were growing up in Mount Shasta?
Speaker 5: That was just kind of the culture I grew up with,
Speaker 5: you know, hunters around, hunters and stuff, So that's kind
Speaker 5: of what we did.
Speaker 2: What were you studying grad school?
Speaker 5: When I was a master student, I actually studied mammals mice.
Speaker 5: But then when I did my PhD, I made the transition.
Speaker 2: What was it? What flipped that switch?
Speaker 5: I was kind of floundering around, but I was interested
Speaker 5: in like questions, evolutionary biology questions, and then I got
Speaker 5: I just got interested and kind of floated around and
Speaker 5: founder rachnids and then yeah, went from there.
Speaker 2: Was it something about their mystique or their web spinning
Speaker 2: or no.
Speaker 5: Initially it was just because they were very poorly known,
Speaker 5: and I thought there was a lot to learn.
Speaker 2: How many species do we know of spiders?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Fifty thousand, fifty thousand described that's so many. Well,
Speaker 5: there's probably twice as many as that, actually, one hundred
Speaker 5: k one hundred one thousand spider species.
Speaker 2: She's a spider. Yeah. Did you ever have the phobia
Speaker 2: of spiders?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 2: No, you probably run into people with it a lot, right,
Speaker 2: or people if they find out what you do, they probably.
Speaker 5: I've heard that. I've heard about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've heard that.
Speaker 5: There's a thing. I think one of your Venezuelan spiders
Speaker 5: hitched a ride here.
Speaker 2: There may be some spiders around here that are very dangerous.
Speaker 2: Do you blame a lot of it on arachnophobia? The film?
Speaker 5: Uh? I mean I think that film's kind of so
Speaker 5: old that people don't watch that anymore.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 5: I think it's just yeah, something about the culture. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's what parents learned. Then they teach their kids the
Speaker 5: same kind of fear.
Speaker 2: I talked to you or her patologists said the same thing.
Speaker 2: About snakes. Yeah, it's just conditioned. See that herpetology episode
Speaker 2: with doctor David Stein about reptiles and how children don't
Speaker 2: start to fear them until they see their elders spooked.
Speaker 2: Even the Mayo Clinic is like, if a family member
Speaker 2: has a specific phobia or anxiety, you're more likely to
Speaker 2: develop it too, because children may learn specific phobias by
Speaker 2: watching how a family member reacts to an object or situation.
Speaker 2: That's straight from the Mayo Clinic. And we're more on
Speaker 2: how fear works in your body and how you have
Speaker 2: what I like to call a screaming almond of terror
Speaker 2: nestled at the center of your brain. We have an
Speaker 2: amazing two part furrology episode with doctor Mary Poffenroth, who
Speaker 2: also has a new book out called Brave New You.
Speaker 2: She's great, But the message here you're scared of spiders
Speaker 2: because probably someone else was in your life. Let's crunch
Speaker 2: the numbers on the actual danger. How many of those
Speaker 2: fifty thousand known species are a danger to humans?
Speaker 5: About fifty five oh fifty out of fifty thousand, pretty
Speaker 5: small percentage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, human beings are probably much more dangerous to that's right.
Speaker 5: I always talk about this in my class. It can
Speaker 5: show a slide of animals that kill people.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 5: And spiders aren't on the list, right, Yeah, they don't
Speaker 5: kill people essentially effectively, so they're not on the top
Speaker 5: fifty list.
Speaker 2: So it's like mosquitoes people. From what I understand, like,
Speaker 2: there's mosquitos and then people.
Speaker 5: And then a bunch of actually dangerous animals like dogs
Speaker 5: or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, right, and here I have one in my
Speaker 2: bed every night, that's right. But if some people see
Speaker 2: a spider outside the right, so yes, I have a
Speaker 2: killer in my bed every night, and her name is Gremlin. Statistically,
Speaker 2: dogs kill twenty five thousand humans a year globally, ranking
Speaker 2: number four on the list of dangerous animals. And you
Speaker 2: can see our recent hippo episode for some debunking in
Speaker 2: that department. But I still love my dog. I'm not
Speaker 2: scared of her. You want to know the top animal killer,
Speaker 2: of course, once again, not spiders. It's mosquitoes. Because of
Speaker 2: their vector born they're responsible for roughly a million human
Speaker 2: deaths annually, and they're not spiders. There are over two
Speaker 2: hundred million mosquito spread cases of malaria a year and
Speaker 2: it's on the rise, and most deaths occur in little
Speaker 2: kiddos under the age of five. Mosquitoes kill more people
Speaker 2: on Earth in one day than sharks have in the
Speaker 2: last century. Spiders are like, leave me out of this people.
Speaker 2: And to be fair, I will say it's not the
Speaker 2: mosquito's fault that they are just lousy with parasites who
Speaker 2: use them for a ride. But the number two animal
Speaker 2: cause death mosquito's number one, dog's number four, snake's number
Speaker 2: three coming in it over a half a million human
Speaker 2: fatalities per year is a species of ape Homo sapiens,
Speaker 2: which means that I have one of those in my
Speaker 2: bed too. So if a mosquito bites me while I'm
Speaker 2: sleeping in my home, I am in bed with three
Speaker 2: potential killers, and none of them are spiders. So in
Speaker 2: terms of what animal could take your ass out, it's
Speaker 2: a mosquito, or a warlord, or a drunk driver, or
Speaker 2: maybe a person who was sold firearms when they don't
Speaker 2: know how to handle them. But it's not going to
Speaker 2: be a spider most likely. So you are needlessly afraid
Speaker 2: of spiders, I get it. The receptionist at my dentist
Speaker 2: office this week told me that she is so afraid
Speaker 2: of spiders that she has broken two phones by throwing
Speaker 2: them across the room when she saw a picture of
Speaker 2: a spider on the phone on the screen. Not a
Speaker 2: real spider, just a screen spider. So what can you do? First,
Speaker 2: you can ask yourself if something happened with a spider
Speaker 2: once that surprised you. One guy friend once told me
Speaker 2: that he hates spiders, and I was like, did you
Speaker 2: ever get surprised by one? And he was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I guess I did have a tarantula crawl across my
Speaker 2: hand in a desert when I was a kid, and
Speaker 2: I was like, well, there you go. So try to
Speaker 2: distinguish between the different emotions of fear and surprise. Also exposure.
Speaker 2: I know you don't want to hear that, but it's true.
Speaker 2: Look at photos first and then see if you can
Speaker 2: hold one, or try to look at some spiders from
Speaker 2: a distance outside. And what you're doing is rewiring your
Speaker 2: brain to learn through exposure that they aren't scarier a threat,
Speaker 2: And then you're teaching the people around you that they
Speaker 2: don't have to fear them either. And unfortunately, whether it's
Speaker 2: about writing an email or texting someone hot or getting
Speaker 2: started on your novel or procrastinating on a work thing,
Speaker 2: or even ordering food over the phone. The more you
Speaker 2: avoid it, the more it scares and owns you. That
Speaker 2: is from my therapist to your brain, and it includes spiders.
Speaker 2: One person asked me if during this episode if I
Speaker 2: could bleep the word spider, and I was like.
Speaker 6: I don't.
Speaker 2: I think that's not the problem hearing the word spider.
Speaker 5: That's right, We're.
Speaker 2: Gonna be saying it could get pretty annoying. Yeah, exposure
Speaker 2: therapy is the way to goes. But what was your
Speaker 2: graduate work in spiders? What part of a technology was that?
Speaker 5: Well, it was pretty I went to grad school in Missouri,
Speaker 5: but I did my work in the Southern Appalachians. Wow.
Speaker 5: And I worked on spiders that like to live in caves.
Speaker 5: Oh like the combination right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. For more on caves, you can see our recent
Speaker 2: Speleology episode about what it's like to spend weeks underground
Speaker 2: sleeping in a hammock for science. Spider roommates are part
Speaker 2: of the job.
Speaker 5: You combine the cave, you combine with the spider. Not
Speaker 5: all of them live in caves, but a lot of
Speaker 5: them live in caves. A lot of them just live
Speaker 5: up in the beautiful mountains of that area.
Speaker 2: Is that a spider rich territory and generally Appalachia. Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 5: Was really spectacular working there.
Speaker 2: Does your work deal with field work or lab work
Speaker 2: or kind of an equal combination both.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in the field is the best.
Speaker 2: People like us? Are you getting? Turn us out with
Speaker 2: a bucket and a flashlight.
Speaker 5: That's so awesome. Looks like a road trip, like a
Speaker 5: three week road trip. I mean you're with people that
Speaker 5: also love nature and are really interested in spiders. And
Speaker 5: every day you're outside in beautiful places looking for things,
Speaker 5: often finding new things, finding new species, lots of rich conversations.
Speaker 5: It's it's the best.
Speaker 2: What kinds of places has that taken you to?
Speaker 5: Well? I mean in California, I've been everywhere. What is
Speaker 5: that a song or something?
Speaker 2: Everywhere?
Speaker 5: Man?
Speaker 7: Bang the ball to mors Aalbadora, Amarilla, Tocopilla, Barnbulla, and Vanilla.
Speaker 2: I'm a gonna I've been everywhere.
Speaker 5: Man, I've been everywhere literally in California, and a lot
Speaker 5: in the Western United States, a lot in eastern United
Speaker 5: States and southern Appalachia, South Africa, Australia, a few times,
Speaker 5: Central America, South America.
Speaker 2: Australia's got some spiders. I've seen pictures of Australian spiders
Speaker 2: and they're like bread plate They're like a palm size,
Speaker 2: right the huntsman's Oh, yes, but it's not just Australia
Speaker 2: that has giants booters.
Speaker 5: Oh, I had a giant crab spider that I just
Speaker 5: found in Arizona. I should have brought it.
Speaker 3: Then.
Speaker 2: How big is a crab spider.
Speaker 5: Well, that giant crab spider is pretty big. They have
Speaker 5: long legs. They can kind of fill your palm or
Speaker 5: something like that. But they're in the same family as
Speaker 5: the spiders you're talking about, sporacids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, their legs are sort of set back a little bit, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this giant crab spider, or Olios gigantius, is a huntsman
Speaker 2: and its legs are more along a horizontal axis than
Speaker 2: a circle, if you can imagine that. And Marshall, this
Speaker 2: man knows his spiders. He's been at this professionally for decades,
Speaker 2: discovering new species and cataloging them and then teaching the
Speaker 2: next generation of what he considers stewards of the environment
Speaker 2: and protectors of the species. He's traveled all kinds of terrain,
Speaker 2: and he says to go spider watching, head to different habitats,
Speaker 2: and our apaiology episode with Joseph Saunders is a really
Speaker 2: great intro into macro photography even with your phone, and
Speaker 2: how to get up close and patient looking for tiny
Speaker 2: creatures with new eyes. So maybe start with some photography.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me for an evolutionary perspective, what do
Speaker 2: we know about the evolution of spiders and how they
Speaker 2: branch off like that? And why do they call things
Speaker 2: that are true spiders not true spiders? What's with that
Speaker 2: taxonomy being a little.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that name's kind of dumb, But we know a
Speaker 5: lot about the spider tree of life. Our knowledge in
Speaker 5: the last ten years has exploded. Tell me, I'm actually
Speaker 5: part of that, but we're using like DNA evidence to
Speaker 5: reconstruct the tree the phylogeny for spiders. My lab was
Speaker 5: the first lab to kind of develop this technique where
Speaker 5: we could pull the same genes from the spider genome
Speaker 5: and compare it across species. So now that you can
Speaker 5: do that, you can easily collect a lot of data
Speaker 5: and reconstruct that phylogeny.
Speaker 2: Marshall says that they used to have to request a
Speaker 2: specie sample sent to look at its gennies under a
Speaker 2: microscope and its mouth parts and stuff to determine who
Speaker 2: it was, what was what species, and if it was
Speaker 2: a novel five and where they fit in with spider evolution.
Speaker 2: Can you give me kind of a broad strokes tree
Speaker 2: of life overview, like when did spiders maybe emerge in history?
Speaker 5: And like the common ancestor of spiders goes back to
Speaker 5: maybe three hundred and fifty million years ago, so that's
Speaker 5: in the Palaeozoic, that's before dinosaurs. But then of course
Speaker 5: they've been evolving since then.
Speaker 2: So when it comes to your war with spiders, spiders
Speaker 2: were here first before you, before dinosaurs. Not to be
Speaker 2: goth about it, but spiders are going to be here
Speaker 2: after you, probably after us. As a species.
Speaker 5: Spider evolutionary history is really old compared to a lot
Speaker 5: of like mammals or birds. It's really really deep history.
Speaker 5: It's like akin to all vertebrates combined, Like all animals
Speaker 5: with a backbone maybe have an evolutionary age that is
Speaker 5: about the same age as all spiders.
Speaker 2: WHOA, yeah, WHOA, they're old. Did certain species of spiders
Speaker 2: kind of remain unchanged? Do we have any that are
Speaker 2: kind of the horseshoe crab all this spider world like
Speaker 2: a living fossil. Yeah, yeah, we do in California. What
Speaker 2: are those, Well, there's a genus called hypo kylas. Okay,
Speaker 2: so hypo kylas have been around since before the dinosaurs,
Speaker 2: and there are what's called an eranomorph or a true spider,
Speaker 2: and eranomorphs or true spiders are most of the spiders
Speaker 2: in the world, about ninety percent of what you might
Speaker 2: see now. Arenomorphs have fangs that point kind of diagonally
Speaker 2: over each other, like having a crossbite, and they include
Speaker 2: critters like jumping spiders and wolf spiders and little house
Speaker 2: spiders making cute cobwebs in your corner, the big huntsman's,
Speaker 2: the little pink and white crab spiders that hide the flowers,
Speaker 2: and those orb weavers that make those gorgeous classic spider webs.
Speaker 2: But another type of spider is what's called a meglomorph,
Speaker 2: which means shrew shaped, and meglomorphs are typically burrowed spelling,
Speaker 2: so they hide little holes. And they include Tarantula's and
Speaker 2: Australia's funnel web spiders, which we're going to get to later.
Speaker 2: And instead of being crisscross miglamore fangs point straight down
Speaker 2: like a little, tiny, cute little vampire. So yeah, true
Speaker 2: spiders are just the eranio morphs. And then our little
Speaker 2: trapdoor and tarantula friends don't count as true spiders. But
Speaker 2: Marshall says that is a ridiculous taxonomy blunder. But yeah,
Speaker 2: back to this living fossil hypocylas spider that Marshall loves.
Speaker 5: But Hypocylas is kind of early on the branch of
Speaker 5: true spiders right here, and.
Speaker 2: They're still kicking, they're still running around.
Speaker 5: They're so awesome. They're called lamp shade spiders. So they
Speaker 5: build a web that looks like this flimsy, beautiful lamp shade,
Speaker 5: and then they sit on the rock kind of behind
Speaker 5: their lamp shade, and they have a morphology that's very cryptic.
Speaker 5: They blend in with the rock, but their morphology hasn't
Speaker 5: evolved really kind of it's morphological stasis.
Speaker 2: What does that mean exactly?
Speaker 5: They just have stayed there the entire time. So they're
Speaker 5: spectacular spiders. That's kind of like when you see them,
Speaker 5: you can envision that the lineage that they exist in
Speaker 5: was there when the dinosaurs were there. They've just been
Speaker 5: there the entire time, kind of in stasis, kind of persisting.
Speaker 2: These little long linen babes build webs that are kind
Speaker 2: of conical, and when the light catches them in dark spaces,
Speaker 2: they take on this glow of a lamp shade. And
Speaker 2: there's some of the more primitive newer species, and Marshall
Speaker 2: loves them, I think it's safe to say. And I
Speaker 2: love that the.
Speaker 5: Beautiful story of evolutionary persistence. And for someone from California,
Speaker 5: it's so cool because you can kind of go there
Speaker 5: and see that very very special spider.
Speaker 2: And this is exciting.
Speaker 5: We actually described a new species of Hypocilis a couple
Speaker 5: of years ago, really from the far southern Sierra Nevada,
Speaker 5: from up near Kernville.
Speaker 2: Did you get to name it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Would you name it?
Speaker 5: It's all the hypochilis Hamote, which is an indigenous name.
Speaker 2: Oh that's great. Yeah, what does it mean?
Speaker 5: Amote? It means from the south.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's beautiful. And according to a newspaper article titled
Speaker 2: his spidy sense must have been tingling, stsu biologists discovers
Speaker 2: new species. This newly discovered beauty is brown, orange and
Speaker 2: black with these iridescent blue and green specs. And it's
Speaker 2: little though, it's described as the size of a pencil eraser.
Speaker 2: So if this genus is one of the older ones,
Speaker 2: what are the newer models of spider? He says that
Speaker 2: some jumping spiders with big eyes and sharp vision. They
Speaker 2: do complicated dancing courtship. And yes, they have the ability
Speaker 2: to bound nearly forty times of their body length, which
Speaker 2: is the equivalent of you jumping over two hundred feet.
Speaker 2: That's from one tip of a seven forty seven wing
Speaker 2: to the tip of the other wing. Jumping spiders can
Speaker 2: do the equivalent of that. But Marshall says not all
Speaker 2: models of spider are from the same time. Some lingering
Speaker 2: under your fridge or sitting on a flower could be
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand years old, while others are one hundred
Speaker 2: million years old. What about sizes? What's the biggest spider?
Speaker 5: Biggest spiders like a big tarantula that you would find
Speaker 5: in Brazil, a bird eating spider like the size of
Speaker 5: a dinner.
Speaker 2: Plate, and they really do eat birds, right, that's what
Speaker 2: I hear. Was that named because someone's like that thing
Speaker 2: could probably eat a bird or are they like, I
Speaker 2: got another bird?
Speaker 5: No, yeah, they found them eating birds.
Speaker 1: Okay, oh my goodness, he eate a bird, Michael, he
Speaker 1: ate a bird?
Speaker 4: Hey eight a bird?
Speaker 2: Well, then that's accurate. What about the range of spiders
Speaker 2: across the globe? Does every continent? Does every latitude have them?
Speaker 5: Except for Antarctica? But everything else there's spiders. There's some
Speaker 5: spiders up in the Arctic. I mean, obviously as you
Speaker 5: get further north, there's fewer of them, but they get
Speaker 5: pretty far north.
Speaker 2: How do they survive those temperatures?
Speaker 5: Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: Let's have it.
Speaker 5: Some of the species that live at either high elevations
Speaker 5: or extreme latitudes must have anti freeze. Yeah, they're spiders
Speaker 5: that are active on the snow.
Speaker 2: Spider anti freeze. You ask the heavens, spider anti freeze. So,
Speaker 2: according to the two thousand and four study anti freeze
Speaker 2: proteins in Alaskan insects and spiders in the Journal of
Speaker 2: Insect Physiology, these cold tolerant little critters have high concentrations
Speaker 2: of a type of alcohol in their hemolymph or blood,
Speaker 2: and proteins that lower the freezing point of water, but
Speaker 2: the melting point stays the same, which is called thermal hysteresis.
Speaker 2: In case you're ever like in the hardest game of
Speaker 2: bar trivia ever known, You're probably never going to need
Speaker 2: to know the term thermal hysteresis, but no I do.
Speaker 2: And while spiders they usually have eight eyes, most have
Speaker 2: to rely on touch to kind of suss out the
Speaker 2: world around them. They're literally navigating the world on vibes,
Speaker 2: and their brains are tiny, and their neural tissue can
Speaker 2: extend all through their torsu. They are thinking with their
Speaker 2: whole chest. What about anatomy of a spider. We've got
Speaker 2: the fangs up front.
Speaker 5: Come back to the basics.
Speaker 2: I like this, yeah, because like, let's get to know spiders.
Speaker 5: They're good.
Speaker 2: We got the fangs up front, typically two, always two,
Speaker 2: always two, So callissary are upfront, and those are the
Speaker 2: jaws of a spider, and they're tipped with little fangs. Now,
Speaker 2: next to those callissory are some short, leggy looking things
Speaker 2: called palps or petipalps, and they can be small and
Speaker 2: right near the mouth, or they can be larger like wolf.
Speaker 2: Spiders sometimes have them with little ping pong paddles or
Speaker 2: boxing gloves at the end, and they're usually bigger in
Speaker 2: man spiders. Now, we did a scorpiology episode with doctor
Speaker 2: Lauren Esposito, and to my delight and shock, I learned
Speaker 2: that scorpions pinchers are technically petapalps. Petipalps petals are those
Speaker 2: technically legs or they just modified legs into mouthparts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're technically legs.
Speaker 2: They are yep. So petty means foot and palps means
Speaker 2: to feel. So they have mouth legs that they use
Speaker 2: like fingers. Tell everyone you know, spiders have mouth legs
Speaker 2: and they live on earth, but.
Speaker 5: They don't really function as legs. They function in a
Speaker 5: sensory way. The spider uses the petopalps to kind of
Speaker 5: sense its environment, unless you're a male spider, in which
Speaker 5: case the petopalps are modified to transfer sperm. But they're
Speaker 5: not walking.
Speaker 2: Legs, so they don't count as legs. But they are appendages.
Speaker 5: They are appendages. They're paired appendages. But technically a spider
Speaker 5: has six pairs of appendages going from front to back.
Speaker 5: That chalissae are paired appendages, but they're not walking legs. Obviously.
Speaker 5: The petapalps are paired appendages, and then the four pairs
Speaker 5: of walking legs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so spiders have twelve appendages. Only eight of them
Speaker 2: are legs and the other four are mouth legs, and
Speaker 2: they're fang area. But even though they have fangs or
Speaker 2: callissary in their head, you might say that spiders kind
Speaker 2: of have two business sense because of course, one lies
Speaker 2: at the base of their little finger butts. If you
Speaker 2: glance down at the dairy air of a spider very closely,
Speaker 2: it may seem to be like if an old lady
Speaker 2: was knitting on a porch and just wave like helloo.
Speaker 2: And then what about spinnerets in the back?
Speaker 5: Those are modified abdominal appendages. Yeah, those are actually very
Speaker 5: cool because you can see them as appendages, like when
Speaker 5: a tarantulus plays out some silk. You can see them
Speaker 5: moving independently.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, like a little like a finger on each
Speaker 2: side of the butt.
Speaker 5: Right exactly. It's really cool.
Speaker 2: As a companion piece. I urge you to see this
Speaker 2: Spidronology episode we did to learn all about spiderwebs and
Speaker 2: spider silk and how they are putting geens that make
Speaker 2: spider silk into silkworms and sometimes goats to make other things.
Speaker 2: It's a wild world. We'll link in the show notes
Speaker 2: but okay, let's talk about their beautiful face and bod
Speaker 2: which are kind of sewn together. They're like neck, no thanks,
Speaker 2: different than an insect, so they fuse their head and
Speaker 2: thorax together.
Speaker 5: Yep Insects are hexapods. They have six legs. M h
Speaker 5: iraknans have well, they have twelve legs, but they have
Speaker 5: eight walking legs.
Speaker 2: When it comes to their internal organs, do they have
Speaker 2: a stomach and an intestine, I understand there are book
Speaker 2: lungs in there that are kind of just like blood
Speaker 2: or hemolymph just squirts out in there. It's kind of
Speaker 2: open concept.
Speaker 5: You mean squirts out bathe.
Speaker 2: Things are just bathe.
Speaker 5: That's right, right, it's an open circulatory system. Right. They
Speaker 5: have this dorsal heart.
Speaker 2: So a dorsal heart, like a dorsal fin, means that
Speaker 2: it runs along its back and down the length. So
Speaker 2: imagine if your heart wasn't on the front side, but
Speaker 2: it ran down your spine. But spiders don't need a
Speaker 2: spine because their skeleton is on the outside of their body.
Speaker 2: But they do have a heart, so it be nice
Speaker 2: to them.
Speaker 5: And then they have hemal lymph that pumps through the body.
Speaker 5: And then the book lungs just lie in contact with
Speaker 5: that hema lymph and then there's respiration across that surface.
Speaker 5: The book lungs, of course include these sheets of cuticle.
Speaker 5: There's extremely high surface areas like the inside of a lung. Oh,
Speaker 5: but it's cuticular.
Speaker 2: So yes, a usually blue colored juice called a hemo
Speaker 2: lymph instead of blood splshy splashes just around inside their body,
Speaker 2: just transporting nutrients and keeping things slippery in kind of
Speaker 2: an open concept circulatory system. But according to the twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two paper Take a Deep Breath The Evolution of
Speaker 2: the Respiratory system of Symphidoonathoid spiders, there are no less
Speaker 2: than twenty two different respiratory configurations in this certain kind
Speaker 2: of spider. And by the way, that's just one family
Speaker 2: of one info order, and that's twenty two different respiratory
Speaker 2: system configurations, so it varies. Marshall says that a lot
Speaker 2: of spiders lose their book lungs with evolution, like and
Speaker 2: other meglomorph spiders, which tend to be older in the
Speaker 2: evolutionary scheme of things, they have four book lungs, which
Speaker 2: are structures kind of like pages in a book that
Speaker 2: have increased surface area for gas exchange.
Speaker 5: But most uranium orph true spiders have moved away from that.
Speaker 5: Some of their book lungs have evolved into little cuticular
Speaker 5: tubes that just permeate the body. It's more efficient. The
Speaker 5: spider can be more active that way because it has
Speaker 5: basically a more efficient circulatory system.
Speaker 2: Are those more like veins exactly?
Speaker 5: It's like a capillary system. You have that kind of clunky,
Speaker 5: open system. And if you're a mygalomorph like a tarantula,
Speaker 5: you have four book lungs and you're kind of slow
Speaker 5: because of your respiratory system. They're metabolically not very active.
Speaker 5: It's like life in the slow lane. But if you're
Speaker 5: a jumping spider, you have this tracheal system that permeates
Speaker 5: the body and they can be very active predators.
Speaker 2: For more on the boggling, dazzling world of dancing jumping spiders,
Speaker 2: see the Kinetic Salicidology episode with the beloved doctor Sebastian Everichi,
Speaker 2: which is all about how spiders dance seductively, and it
Speaker 2: also includes a bonus electronica track made of spider thumps
Speaker 2: composed by Jason Scartamalia. It's so good. Yeah, they are
Speaker 2: jumping around all the time. But you never see a
Speaker 2: tarantula doing no, that's right, than lumbering.
Speaker 5: And like a trapdoor spider, it just sits in its burrow. Literally,
Speaker 5: it can sit there without eating for a year. Is
Speaker 5: like sitting in its closet. I'm just gonna I'll pass
Speaker 5: this year, catch me again next year. Right, It's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: It's like going fishing and you're like, I'm just going
Speaker 2: to sit in this boat.
Speaker 5: But it's super duper efficient in their lifestyle. They can
Speaker 5: persist in the landscape.
Speaker 2: They can outweight yeah, their prey, that's right. How often
Speaker 2: do most spiders eat? Do they need to eat daily?
Speaker 5: It depends on what they are. If you're a jumping spider,
Speaker 5: you need to eat a lot, But if you're a
Speaker 5: trapdoor spider, literally they can eat once a year. It's crazy.
Speaker 5: I don't know how it works.
Speaker 2: Can we talk more about trap door spiders the one
Speaker 2: who hang out in a burrow and then seal it
Speaker 2: with a little quirk like manhole they made of dirt,
Speaker 2: plants and silk, or one species of trapdoor spider whose
Speaker 2: actual ass is flattened like a disc that they use
Speaker 2: to close their little house off. They use their butt
Speaker 2: as a door. It's a back door, front door made
Speaker 2: of spider butt. Can we talk about trap door spiders? Great?
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Trapdoor spiders I think are amazing because they've got absolute
Speaker 2: bonkers camouflage.
Speaker 5: They've shown that female trap door spiders can live for
Speaker 5: forty five years in the wild. Yeah, how that's right again,
Speaker 5: it's kind of life in the slow lane.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: In Australia, these kind of beautiful studies, they marked the
Speaker 5: burrows of spiders and they just kept following them through time,
Speaker 5: and there was this one big female matriarch and she
Speaker 5: lived essentially forever. Forty five years for such a small
Speaker 5: bodied animal is really really cool and it's very different
Speaker 5: from other arthropods. And then finally, only one day they
Speaker 5: walked into the forest and they found her trapdoor had
Speaker 5: a hole in it. The wasp had finally got her
Speaker 5: forty five years. No, that must have been pretty sad, actually, yeah,
Speaker 5: find that. But it's still cool.
Speaker 2: And for more on this, you can see the twenty
Speaker 2: eighteen study The Longest Lived Spider Meglomorph's Dig Deeper and Persevere,
Speaker 2: which reports that this legendary trapdoor lady, who went by
Speaker 2: the title of Number sixteen was observed from her first
Speaker 2: spring as a spiderling up until her death in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: living to be forty three years old. Forty three a
Speaker 2: spider in her forties, and her principal watcher was the
Speaker 2: Australian Lady of the Spiders and a ra acknologist, doctor
Speaker 2: Barbara York Maine, who worked into her eighties. Motivated she
Speaker 2: had said, by seeing how long Number sixteen would stay alive,
Speaker 2: and doctor York Mayne she died of complications from Alzheimer's
Speaker 2: just months after that final paper was published, and Barbara's mentee,
Speaker 2: Leanda Mason, who took over the field work, has said
Speaker 2: that in doctor york Maine's advanced memory loss, she remembered
Speaker 2: Number sixteen, but perhaps mercifully forgot that Number sixteen had died.
Speaker 2: Now they are in the beyond, hopefully hanging out together
Speaker 2: in the ether and waiting for bugs. And so what
Speaker 2: was the secret to the long life of number sixteen?
Speaker 2: At least so studies on these slow moving arachnids site
Speaker 2: that sedentary, fiercely solitary lifestyle in unkempt environments and what
Speaker 2: we would call very intermittent fasting keep these babies alive longer,
Speaker 2: and also to mate. A female soaks a mat of
Speaker 2: her own silk with some sexy pheromones and then waits
Speaker 2: for a male to knock on her door, and then
Speaker 2: when she answers, he blocks her fangs with his leg
Speaker 2: and injects a handful of spermy silk in her. So
Speaker 2: a long, perhaps lonely life, not eating much, putting out
Speaker 2: a personal ad on your doorstep, you open the door
Speaker 2: and you get jiu jitsu with jiz So like as
Speaker 2: much as I like to glean strength from nature, as
Speaker 2: your internet dad uncle I or you do not use
Speaker 2: trap door spiders as a physical or a mental health model.
Speaker 5: It's such a cool study. And you know, to be
Speaker 5: able to follow an individual spider for forty five years
Speaker 5: is really awesome.
Speaker 2: And are those wasps those tarantula hawk.
Speaker 5: Wasps probably yeah, like a spider wasp on pilled.
Speaker 2: I've seen some of those in our backyard because I
Speaker 2: know we have trapped doors get away from I know,
Speaker 2: I know this stinkers gorgeous insects, but I'm also like, no,
Speaker 2: not the trapdoor spider.
Speaker 5: What kind of trap door spiders do you have? Oh?
Speaker 2: That's such a great question.
Speaker 5: California trapp spiders. Yeah bothreeo, yeah, awesome.
Speaker 2: When it rains twice or three times, they've tried to
Speaker 2: come into the house, and a couple have perished that
Speaker 2: those are the males. The males, Yeah, speaking of males.
Speaker 2: And then once one was just lumbering down our hallway
Speaker 2: and my husband started screaming, partly out of a little
Speaker 2: bit of shock, but also because he knew I'd be
Speaker 2: so excited.
Speaker 5: Nice.
Speaker 2: It was like going and we were trying to find
Speaker 2: a good place.
Speaker 5: The males use heavy rains as cues to leave their burrow.
Speaker 2: Where are they going?
Speaker 5: They're looking for the female. It's time to go.
Speaker 2: They're not in my garage.
Speaker 5: Well, they don't know.
Speaker 2: Get out of here. Man, God, ladies to meet.
Speaker 5: That's the ridiculous thing about male trapped or spiders. So
Speaker 5: they live in their burrow, let's say, for five or
Speaker 5: six years, and they're molting, they're getting bigger. They're in
Speaker 5: their burrow. They live in California. It hasn't rained for
Speaker 5: six months. It's October, first rain of the season. They've
Speaker 5: molted to maturity. They're like, okay, it's time to go.
Speaker 5: But how do they know where They're going like, they
Speaker 5: just clumber out of their burrow. This is the first
Speaker 5: time they've ever done that, and then they have to
Speaker 5: go find a female. I'm a little nervous. It's actually
Speaker 5: it seems maladaptive to me. I have no idea how
Speaker 5: it works, but it obviously does work.
Speaker 2: They find females, and so if we see one inside again,
Speaker 2: returning them to the hillside is the best.
Speaker 5: Just put it on the outside. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, we talked about burrows, We've talked about jumping spiders.
Speaker 2: So when it comes to hunting, obviously spiders are great
Speaker 2: at it. Hence the fangs and the venom, fangs in
Speaker 2: the venom, and their web and the web.
Speaker 5: The web.
Speaker 2: Now, all spiders make silk, but not all of them
Speaker 2: use webs to catch right, So what are some hunting
Speaker 2: methods and living methods that spiders use?
Speaker 5: Well, you have like the bull of spider. You know
Speaker 5: about the bull ass spider.
Speaker 2: I don't think I do.
Speaker 5: You don't know about the bull ass spider?
Speaker 2: I don't think so is this a joke?
Speaker 5: No, bull of spider is a derived or weaving spider, Okay,
Speaker 5: like a Charlotte's web spider. Oh okay, yes, that they've
Speaker 5: taken the Charlotte's web and instead of building a complex
Speaker 5: orb web like that, they just have a single line
Speaker 5: of silk. And at the end of the single line
Speaker 5: of silk they have a sticky ball of glue.
Speaker 4: What what this thing is flinging a sticky ball around
Speaker 4: to catch stuff And bullus means ball and these bull
Speaker 4: of spiders, according to your bff Workipedia, they hunt by
Speaker 4: using one or more tacky little capture.
Speaker 2: Blobs on the end of a silk. It's like a
Speaker 2: lasso made of your body secretions.
Speaker 5: That's cool, But the cooler thing is that they emit
Speaker 5: chemicals that mimic moth pheromones. So those bull of spider
Speaker 5: sits in one place and they attract moths. This is
Speaker 5: happening at night, and then when the moth is attracted,
Speaker 5: they whip their bullus and catch it with the sticky glue. No,
Speaker 5: that's pretty specialized.
Speaker 2: No one's never told me about that.
Speaker 5: And they attract moths of like a single species, so
Speaker 5: they're very species specific, Like they attract male moths of
Speaker 5: a single species, right, because they're producing a chemical that
Speaker 5: mimics female moth pheromone. Yeah, aggressive chemical mimicry. They're spectacular.
Speaker 2: Sounds like a moth rodeo. I'm excited about this.
Speaker 5: That's right, it's a moth rodeo. But they can actually
Speaker 5: switch their chemical in the middle of the evening and
Speaker 5: start to attract a different species. It's ridiculous. The whole
Speaker 5: thing is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: That is ridiculous, spectacular and it is just all going
Speaker 2: on under cover of night in it maybe from a
Speaker 2: tree branch.
Speaker 5: Right, they are orb weaving spiders. They just no longer
Speaker 5: make an orb web.
Speaker 2: Wow, They're like webs are so five minutes ago. I'm
Speaker 2: one of this new stuff. What about funnel web spiders? Okay,
Speaker 2: so there are two kinds of funnel web spiders and
Speaker 2: one is a harmless sweety pd one is not.
Speaker 5: That's good to clarify. So Australian funnel web spiders are
Speaker 5: my gallomorphs, and those are the most medically dangerous to
Speaker 5: human spiders in the world. And the females and the
Speaker 5: males they silk. They kind of live underground or on trees,
Speaker 5: and then they have like this messy web like a
Speaker 5: funnel web at the entrance, but the male same idea
Speaker 5: multimaturity and then they go look for females, but they
Speaker 5: have evolved venoms to protect themselves from predators when they're
Speaker 5: wandering around. Oh, those venoms happen to be also highly
Speaker 5: dangerous to people, so they've killed people. They're deadly spiders,
Speaker 5: but there are anti venoms that have been developed.
Speaker 2: It's like they're carrying pepper spray or something. They're like,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be a we walking out at night. They're
Speaker 2: going to be safe here, that's right. So knowing your
Speaker 2: spiders and not avoiding them is what will keep you
Speaker 2: the safest. I am chill around local spiders because I
Speaker 2: know who's who. And so if you're traveling somewhere new
Speaker 2: or even just around your own area, get to know
Speaker 2: spiders so you can kind of kick back around most
Speaker 2: of them. And I'll give you a heads up that
Speaker 2: there is a Brazilian wandering spider known to be a
Speaker 2: bit aggressive, and its bite can cause rapid heart rate
Speaker 2: and high blood pressure, dizziness, sweating, hair standing up on end,
Speaker 2: and in that vein painfully long lasting erections, so much
Speaker 2: so that the pharmaceutical industry is eyeing it as a
Speaker 2: treatment for dick props. It's also sometimes conveniently called a
Speaker 2: banana spider. Now, on the other end, what about anti venom?
Speaker 2: So A Journal of Toxicology paper titled anti venom Treatment
Speaker 2: in Arachnetism says that the spiders it would cause you
Speaker 2: the most problems are the widows, the recklesses, and that
Speaker 2: wandering Brazilian spider. Anyone with writer's block feel free to
Speaker 2: use reclose widow wandrous to Brazil as a prompt go
Speaker 2: make a novel. But anti venom this was news to me.
Speaker 2: It's sometimes made by milking spider fangs or dissecting venom
Speaker 2: out of the spider and injecting it into an animal
Speaker 2: like a horse, with tiny doses, and then more and
Speaker 2: more so their bodies build antibodies to the venom. Then
Speaker 2: the horse blood is gathered and the antibodies to the
Speaker 2: venom are injected in you and they bind to venom
Speaker 2: to neutralize it. However, this sucks. Your body can make
Speaker 2: antibodies to the antibodies, which means that some anti venom
Speaker 2: really doesn't help much the second time around. But even
Speaker 2: one shot at getting away with a fatal bite seems
Speaker 2: like magic. It's been around since the nineteen eighties and
Speaker 2: one of its developers, Emil von Bahering, also won the
Speaker 2: Nobel Prize for helping to develop the dip barrya vaccine,
Speaker 2: and he was known as quote the savior of children
Speaker 2: because so many kids used to die from diphtheria. So
Speaker 2: vaccines literal modern miracles. But yeah, know your spiders. Sometimes
Speaker 2: your throne a curveball and a small funnel web spider
Speaker 2: in say California, is totally harmless. But there is another
Speaker 2: type of funnel web spider that is chunky, highly venomous
Speaker 2: and Australian.
Speaker 5: If you're in Australia, you know what a funnel web spider.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker 5: I actually picked one up back in the day when
Speaker 5: I was I was on the eastern seaboard of Australia
Speaker 5: on a field trip and we went to this friend
Speaker 5: of mine's house and he had this patch of forest
Speaker 5: that was covered in my Gallimore spiders. It was wonderful.
Speaker 5: But I found a bunnel web spider and I picked
Speaker 5: it up because I didn't know what it was, and
Speaker 5: he was like, I wouldn't do that.
Speaker 2: Whatever you're called, obviously you're survived. Congratulations on that. It's
Speaker 2: like you one, what about sexual dimorphism, because I know
Speaker 2: with the orb weavers, it's beautiful to see this ginormous,
Speaker 2: beautiful female and then there's like there's like a little
Speaker 2: dude hanging out on.
Speaker 5: The corner male.
Speaker 2: Yeah. How different across the board? Do we tend to
Speaker 2: see the different sexes? Do we tend to see larger females?
Speaker 5: Generally larger females than males, but the amount of dimorphism varies.
Speaker 5: It's generally the case that the females are bigger than
Speaker 5: the males, but sometimes the males are pretty close to
Speaker 5: the female size. But then and some spiders, males are
Speaker 5: stupidly small, like a golden silk spider.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, yes, but.
Speaker 5: The females are gigantic, Like if you go to Costa Rica,
Speaker 5: they'll see this gigantic female and the male is literally like, oh,
Speaker 5: one to one hundredths of their size.
Speaker 2: It's like a tuba versus a kazoo. It's like, what
Speaker 2: is going on?
Speaker 5: Not even that, it's worse than that. Males have very
Speaker 5: different lives than females, so they're morphologies often very different.
Speaker 2: Is it because they just don't need to capture as
Speaker 2: many nutrients to create offspring? How are their lives so different.
Speaker 5: Well, they're typically vagrant, so they're having to move around
Speaker 5: the habitat more than a female. The female is just
Speaker 5: going to stay there and the male comes and look
Speaker 5: for her. And again, they don't care about food. Once
Speaker 5: they mult to maturity, they don't care about food. They're
Speaker 5: just looking for females.
Speaker 2: Hello, ladies.
Speaker 5: They have a different kind of natural history or a
Speaker 5: different life history once they're ready to go, once they're
Speaker 5: sexually mature.
Speaker 2: Do you have a favorite spider?
Speaker 5: I love Hypokylis. I love the idea of hypokilis. I
Speaker 5: can take you to see Hypochylus.
Speaker 2: I know I want to go.
Speaker 5: Let me know if you want to go see them.
Speaker 2: You're kidding field trip to see spiders? Heck?
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So these are those little ancient lamb shade spiders that
Speaker 2: we chatted about earlier, and one of perhaps the rarest
Speaker 2: lives right outside of La in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Speaker 5: It's called Hypochylis Bernardino and it's only known from It's
Speaker 5: literally the species is only known from like one little
Speaker 5: creek drainage. Oh my god, they're pretty rare, but I
Speaker 5: know where they live. I'm actually going on not this
Speaker 5: coming Sunday, but the Sunday after that.
Speaker 2: Okay, holler, okay, yeah, that'd be serious. I am, I am.
Speaker 5: You just can't tell anyone where they are.
Speaker 2: Oh, I would never. Once you're in with spider people,
Speaker 2: you can never betray that trust. They're few and far
Speaker 2: between of us. Just an update on this. The day
Speaker 2: we were supposed to meet up for the spider hunt,
Speaker 2: which was a bristlingly hot and dry weekend, a forty
Speaker 2: three thousand acre fire in the same mountains thwarted our plants. Now,
Speaker 2: this spider's habitat should be fine, but given that this
Speaker 2: species has been discovered in exactly one creek drainage in
Speaker 2: all of the world, climate change, habitat loss, and in
Speaker 2: general insect or prey decline all threaten spider populations. And
Speaker 2: Marshall's specialty is finding and highlighting the spiders with the
Speaker 2: small distributions. I asked him how he does it, and
Speaker 2: he said, a lot of fieldwork. Do you have really
Speaker 2: good hiking boots?
Speaker 5: I have multiple pairs.
Speaker 2: I bet three pairs. Actually, I bet you a good
Speaker 2: mileage on am I do typical like a Fitbit day
Speaker 2: for you would be like twenty thousand steps, I guess.
Speaker 2: And when you're in the field, something crazy.
Speaker 5: I'm in the field, it's time to go boots on
Speaker 5: the ground. It's actually called boots on the ground. Is
Speaker 5: it really important to be in the field these days?
Speaker 5: It really is. You need to be out there just
Speaker 5: kind of see what's going on of seeing.
Speaker 2: What about their eyes? What kind of eye sight? I
Speaker 2: know what? Various species to species. Some probably need their
Speaker 2: eyes and low.
Speaker 5: Leg that jumping spiders can see really well and in color.
Speaker 5: Many of them can see in color well. Spider's pretty
Speaker 5: good eyesight, but it's kind of more nocturnal and really
Speaker 5: kind of motion detection vision. Some blind cave spiders have
Speaker 5: no eyes.
Speaker 2: Who needs them.
Speaker 5: Lots of spiders have eight eyes, some have six, some
Speaker 5: have four, some have two, some have zero.
Speaker 2: Do they use all of those eyes for different things?
Speaker 5: Yeah, kind of for different things, like their principal main
Speaker 5: eyes in the front. They might use them to actually
Speaker 5: see things like a jumping spider, but then all the
Speaker 5: peripheral eyes are used to kind of detect motion around them.
Speaker 2: Can I ask you listener questions? Yes, okay, all right,
Speaker 2: so don't go anywhere because your questions are next. But
Speaker 2: first we'll donate to a cause of theologist choosing and
Speaker 2: this week in honor of Marshall is going to the
Speaker 2: San Diego State University Biodiversity Museum to support student stipends
Speaker 2: and the purchase of a quipment and supplies in their
Speaker 2: donation was made possible by sponsors. You're on the.
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Speaker 2: All right, let us burrow into the question bag and
Speaker 2: see what we catch. Okay, Courtney Hudson says, I remember
Speaker 2: hearing at some point or reading somewhere that on average,
Speaker 2: you're never more than eight inches from a spider. So
Speaker 2: I'd like to know if that's actually true or if
Speaker 2: I just made that up somehow. And then also, can
Speaker 2: we talk about micro spiders, because I want to know
Speaker 2: about them little cuties? What spiders? If you're outside, do
Speaker 2: you think you're around less than a foot from a
Speaker 2: spider at all times? No, I would say, no, okay,
Speaker 2: there's not that many spiders.
Speaker 5: No, it depends on where you are, but no, in California.
Speaker 2: No, okay, what about micro spiders? Are there tiny tiny
Speaker 2: spiders called micro spiders?
Speaker 5: Oh? Yeah, there's spiders less than a millimeter in size.
Speaker 2: Yeah, full grown.
Speaker 5: Full grown adults. Kind of ridiculous. In particular, there are
Speaker 5: some male spiders that are really small like that, and
Speaker 5: basically the male is just like, it's just kind of
Speaker 5: like a walking petipalp.
Speaker 2: Aren't they all?
Speaker 5: That's a walking intromittent organ.
Speaker 2: They got one job. I googled what's the world's smallest spider?
Speaker 2: And I landed on a Wikipedia page that was simply
Speaker 2: three sentences. I'd like to read them to you. Patoo
Speaker 2: marklessi is a species of small spider endemic to Samoa.
Speaker 2: It is considered the smallest spider in the world, as
Speaker 2: male legspan is less than half a millimeter. It also
Speaker 2: has the largest sex organs to body size ratio of
Speaker 2: any spider species, and the size of its sex organs
Speaker 2: tend to be a hindrance to mating rather than an advantage.
Speaker 2: What an emotional journey. Never underestimate a short king. Okay,
Speaker 2: we've talked about book lungs Ana, Dylan, Elie Snowden, Rachel
Speaker 2: McGill want to know why are their butts so big?
Speaker 2: What's in there? Is that where they hide all the
Speaker 2: web or the spider babies are. Why are their beautiful
Speaker 2: butts so large? Good question that.
Speaker 5: It is a good question. Yeah, not like a big
Speaker 5: adult female would be doing both. She would have her
Speaker 5: spider babies in there, and that's where all of our
Speaker 5: soap glands are. And of course if you're talking about
Speaker 5: an orb weaving spider, then they have multiple different types
Speaker 5: of soap glands. So their abdomen is technically just packed
Speaker 5: full of all these glands that are making silk proteins. Ah,
Speaker 5: that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: It is very cool. It's just a silk factory housed
Speaker 2: in a dump truck abdomen. Now, Mother's Day just passed,
Speaker 2: but it's never too late to remind mom that one
Speaker 2: species of velvet arachnid, called the Indian cooperative spider, lives
Speaker 2: in a colony of mostly females working together to build webs.
Speaker 2: But a few weeks after their kids hatch, the mama
Speaker 2: liquefies her own internal organs to regurgitate them into her
Speaker 2: children's mouths. And she does this until she dies, and
Speaker 2: then the children hop on her dead body and drink
Speaker 2: the rest of her juice until nothing is left but
Speaker 2: an exoskeleton. Now, this is a testament to the strength
Speaker 2: of the biological inclination to care for young and also
Speaker 2: the absolutely exhausted urge to just cash it in and
Speaker 2: go to heaven when you have seventy five babies at once.
Speaker 2: So patrons Lisa Gorman and Mikaylae Shaughnessy in Mikayla's words,
Speaker 2: who asked, how much am I rooting their day when
Speaker 2: I accidentally sweep up their nests? Like, probably a lot.
Speaker 2: It's the only thing they live for. But to patrons
Speaker 2: Aaron White Day were Jesse and Devin, who all asked,
Speaker 2: in Devin's words, why do spiders have so many babies
Speaker 2: all at once? Well, it's because baby spiders are delicious.
Speaker 2: If you are a bird or a lizard or a fish,
Speaker 2: they are like popcorn chicken. You know who else eats you?
Speaker 2: If you're a baby spiderling your own siblings. It's worse
Speaker 2: than any prestige TV drama about family dynamics you'll ever watch. Like,
Speaker 2: a tarantula can have up to three thousand babies at
Speaker 2: a time and very few were going to make it
Speaker 2: to their own parenthood. But what if you're not so
Speaker 2: committed to juicing your own viscera for your babies and
Speaker 2: you're also a spider, so eating dogare for a living.
Speaker 2: And Christina Craft wanted to know what's up with having
Speaker 2: a backpack and made of your children? Some of them
Speaker 2: have live babies on their backs? What's going on with that?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I mean they're a good little they're good mothers.
Speaker 5: So like a wolf, spider will carry around her eggsac
Speaker 5: like a white disc for a long time, and then
Speaker 5: the spider leans will come out of that eggsack and
Speaker 5: then they crawl onto the female's back and do that
Speaker 5: for a couple more molts.
Speaker 2: And they don't eat each other. No, oh, some spiders
Speaker 2: snack on one another, right, they can do that? Yeah,
Speaker 2: after a good date. It can happen from what I understand.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's kind of like famous. But
Speaker 5: I would say that that's the exception rather than the rule.
Speaker 2: So to Trista Algar who said, my girlfriend wants to
Speaker 2: know if there are cannibal spiders, the answer is hell, yes,
Speaker 2: but not all of them all the time. And to
Speaker 2: Danielle Napolitano, the story about black widows eating their males
Speaker 2: is not always true. They don't do it every time. Also,
Speaker 2: the females can be twice the size of the males,
Speaker 2: so the males is a little sneaky snack. Now, let's
Speaker 2: say that you're a red back Australian widow spider. If
Speaker 2: your male, only twenty percent of you will have a
Speaker 2: chance to mate. So when you follow the scent of
Speaker 2: other males spiders into a lady's web, you pluck on
Speaker 2: it like a harp. Some will do what's called a
Speaker 2: copulatory somersault and they land into the fangs of their bride. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she might meet you, but otherwise you would die a virgin.
Speaker 2: In this way, she gets to feast upon your body
Speaker 2: and make your shared babies. It's not all bad. Now,
Speaker 2: On that note, I found myself following some sex trail
Speaker 2: to a paper titled Spider behaviors include oral sexual Encounters,
Speaker 2: which detailed that quote. Our field and laboratory study of
Speaker 2: Madagascar Darwin's bark spiders uncovers a rich sexual repertoire that
Speaker 2: predictably involves cannibalism, genital mutilation, male preference for freshly molted
Speaker 2: tender females, and emasculation. Surprisingly, this species of male spiders
Speaker 2: also engage in oral sexual encounters. It then added that
Speaker 2: irrespective of a female's age or mating status, males salivate
Speaker 2: onto female gen tellia pre during and post copulation. So
Speaker 2: maybe that's how you don't get eaten. Everyone loves to
Speaker 2: hear a juicy story, that's right.
Speaker 5: They kind of love that sexual cannibalism, but it doesn't
Speaker 5: always happen.
Speaker 2: Roslin Hasby for Colin Hasby wants to know how do
Speaker 2: spiders poop just like anyone else. I guess, yeah.
Speaker 5: They have a little anal tubercle near their spinnerets, in
Speaker 5: between their spinnerets and behind them, and they just poop
Speaker 5: out generally a little kind of liquid gray poop.
Speaker 2: Oh, So it's not like frast it's not like little sand.
Speaker 5: No, it's not like No, it's not like a little
Speaker 5: mouse poop or anything. Okay, it's more liquid than that.
Speaker 2: In my office, I have an office that's a shed
Speaker 2: outside my house, and there are last count eight spiders
Speaker 2: that live in there. I check on them from time
Speaker 2: to time. They eat a lot of ants.
Speaker 5: Eight individuals.
Speaker 2: Say one over in that corner whenever in that I'm
Speaker 2: going to take some pictures, okay, because mostly I just
Speaker 2: see their webs and I go, thanks, man.
Speaker 5: Send them to me. I'll, okay, identify them for a
Speaker 5: fives hell yeah bye.
Speaker 2: But five bucks each Mega four four seventy five with
Speaker 2: a forty five cent tip. So patrons Moe and Tristan Falk, Yes,
Speaker 2: it is actually beneficial to have a little spider roommate
Speaker 2: for bug control. And no, Tristan, you have not been
Speaker 2: lied to. This is true. Now, if you live in
Speaker 2: parts of the country like the southeastern United States, you
Speaker 2: should familiarize yourself with local species, like know the body
Speaker 2: shape of a black and brown widow and check for
Speaker 2: the red or orange hourglass where a belly button would be.
Speaker 2: Know the tiny violin shape on a brown reclose google
Speaker 2: an Australian funnel web spider. And if you know the
Speaker 2: venomous ones, then it's easier to spot all the non
Speaker 2: threatening ones, which are the vast majority of spiders. And
Speaker 2: although last week's episode was about AI ethics, one feature
Speaker 2: you may not know about your phone or your other
Speaker 2: non iPhone phones is that it does have this very
Speaker 2: cool ability to identify species at least guess about the id.
Speaker 2: So you can take a picture of a spider or
Speaker 2: a plant or what have you, and you swipe up
Speaker 2: on the picture and the location will be on there
Speaker 2: as well as now an AI guess on the species.
Speaker 2: Try it. It's bonkers. I'm usually a friend that people
Speaker 2: text to ask what the hell bug is this? And
Speaker 2: I don't want people knowing about this phone feature because
Speaker 2: then no one's gonna ask me anymore, and I don't
Speaker 2: get to look it up, and then my off the
Speaker 2: cuff knowledge of bugs is no longer impressive to acquaintances,
Speaker 2: who texts me once a year with a bug question.
Speaker 2: But let's say you have a house spider on your
Speaker 2: hands or on your wall, which can be one single
Speaker 2: species with a common name house spider, or confusingly, can
Speaker 2: be one of a dozen or so at least in
Speaker 2: the US that are referred to casually as house spiders
Speaker 2: because they like to shack up with you where it's
Speaker 2: nice and dry, the rent is paid. So many of
Speaker 2: you Emma Henson, AA, Dylan, Jacob Shepherd, Denny Karina Reagan,
Speaker 2: Carrie Walker, Nita Chen, Hannah Gory, Caitlin Melndor, Derek Pelquin,
Speaker 2: Rachel Harshorn, Melanie matskar and Nisip Brillard and first time
Speaker 2: question asker Amber Hayes wanted to know in Amber's words,
Speaker 2: I heard that if you put a spider you find
Speaker 2: in your house outside, it's like a death sentence for them.
Speaker 2: Is this true? Aren't they from the outside? Amber Hayes,
Speaker 2: great question, and I'm sorry to say that, yes, somehow
Speaker 2: spiders just can't make it out there on their own.
Speaker 2: But if it's between that and squishing it, just put
Speaker 2: it outside. Maybe it'll find its way back in. But
Speaker 2: hide in your bookshelf better. Also, if you need the
Speaker 2: best device for grabbing bugs, there's a thing called a
Speaker 2: my critter catcher. It looks like a soft bristle brush
Speaker 2: and it's attached to a three foot pole so you
Speaker 2: can kind of gently scoop them up into the bristles
Speaker 2: and then walk outside with them.
Speaker 6: Grinter Catcher, let you safely grab those bugs without any
Speaker 6: fear and release them harmlessly outside where they belong.
Speaker 2: Okay, it sounds like mean, but for functionality and kindness
Speaker 2: to I give it a twelve out of ten. Every
Speaker 2: home needs one, and some homes do need spiders because
Speaker 2: they eat so many other bugs. Now, Dave Cannon said,
Speaker 2: I don't mind spiders. I think they're great, really, but
Speaker 2: how many are okay to keep secretly in the house?
Speaker 2: Don't tell my wife, now, Dave, get familiar with the
Speaker 2: venomous ones in your area, escort those outside, and keep
Speaker 2: as many around the house as you like. I think
Speaker 2: I just told your wife when you told me not to.
Speaker 2: But whatever. Now. Others had a sweet spot for spooters,
Speaker 2: such as patrons Natalie Parsons, Tamracatino, and Lucy Antonelli, who asked,
Speaker 2: how do I become friends with spiders? Honestly, here's my advice.
Speaker 2: Let them stick around and don't kill them is probably
Speaker 2: a good first step to any kind of diplomacy, and
Speaker 2: for more on that, you can see our recent Genocidology episode,
Speaker 2: which will link in the show notes and spoiler it's
Speaker 2: not about spiders now. Chan and Cody asked do spiders
Speaker 2: want hugs? And I dug into some research on this
Speaker 2: and it's no. But back to that hairiness, Batty Fat
Speaker 2: asked about their fur and Emma Kelly Brown, Jason Ganley,
Speaker 2: Body Fat, Jorn Fredberg want to know why are they
Speaker 2: so hairy? Now? That's not fur though, right, that's no SETI.
Speaker 5: Site Yep, A lot of them aren't. Some of them
Speaker 5: are like a wolf. Spider has quite a bit of
Speaker 5: setae that make them kind of look like that. But
Speaker 5: tarantula certainly has a lot of set that make them
Speaker 5: look kind of hairy, but certainly not an ubiquitous thing
Speaker 5: for spiders to be like that. And generally the case
Speaker 5: their cephalothorax has fewer hairs than the abdomen. The abdomen
Speaker 5: is generally covered with quite a few hairs that make
Speaker 5: them look kind of furry.
Speaker 2: And many spiders have a variety of sense organs, which
Speaker 2: was recapped by the twenty eighteen paper The Sensory Equipment
Speaker 2: of a Spider, a morphological survey of different types of
Speaker 2: sensillum in both sexes of ur ip Brunecci, and the
Speaker 2: paper says that they include structural ones to sense air
Speaker 2: movement and vibration, chemosensory organs that might aid with smell
Speaker 2: and taste, and some spiders have ears on their legs.
Speaker 2: One of those spiders is called an ogre faced spider.
Speaker 2: And despite yeah, having eyes like a lemur and hairy
Speaker 2: tusks like a walrus, calling them ogre faced is rude
Speaker 2: because they can hear you with their creepy legs. Now,
Speaker 2: as long as we're name calling, Stacy Pinkowitz wants to
Speaker 2: know thoughts on calling spiders bugs even though they're not insects.
Speaker 5: I'm against it.
Speaker 2: Okay, they're not bugs. Spiders are not bugs.
Speaker 5: Spiders are not bugs. Okay, most insects are not bugs.
Speaker 2: Oh because true bugs himistera.
Speaker 5: That's right, we really want to get into it.
Speaker 2: And then again, there are true spiders that are not called
Speaker 2: true spiders. We have a brand, major brand.
Speaker 5: That true spider thing is problematic.
Speaker 2: So true bugs belong to an order of insects called Hymiptera,
Speaker 2: which are shield shaped like a stink bug. And Patron's
Speaker 2: analyst young and tarantula lover Win Constantini asked about tarantula
Speaker 2: is not being true spiders, And yes that is technically
Speaker 2: true because their order is a get older and they
Speaker 2: have some anatomical differences. But once again this spider expert
Speaker 2: thinks that sucks. Also, patron INGVI wanted to know what's
Speaker 2: up with the word tarantula, and I'm glad you asked,
Speaker 2: because I didn't know what I got to learn. So
Speaker 2: first off, there aren't tarantulas in Italy, and as an Italian,
Speaker 2: I can assure you sometimes we are very stupid. But
Speaker 2: there's a wolf spider that inhabits the area of Taranto.
Speaker 2: It was named after the town because people thought when
Speaker 2: you were bitten by this wolf spider, you would get
Speaker 2: very bummed out and sometimes experience mania, and the only
Speaker 2: way to sweat out the venom was to dance a
Speaker 2: frenetic jig, which is why Italians dance around at weddings
Speaker 2: doing the tarantella. This is also where filmmaker Quentin Tarantino
Speaker 2: got his name as a descendant of folks from Taranto,
Speaker 2: And honestly, I can see him getting both depressed and
Speaker 2: also very energetic and happened to just wiggle it out.
Speaker 2: But yeah, there are some word origins with a side
Speaker 2: of eight legs. Tarantula's not called spiders. Not all bugs
Speaker 2: are true bugs.
Speaker 5: But like when I teach entomology and one of my
Speaker 5: students says I found a bug, I get kind of
Speaker 5: stoked because I think they're talking about a hemiptern. No
Speaker 5: luck sometimes no.
Speaker 2: Eating dog hair for a living Danny C and Moe
Speaker 2: want to know, are there any that are facing extinction,
Speaker 2: any that are in real dire straits or we probably
Speaker 2: wouldn't know because there's so many.
Speaker 5: There are spiders in the United States that are listed
Speaker 5: as US federally endangered. Yeah, I actually work on those.
Speaker 5: I'm kind of proud of my spider conservation work research.
Speaker 5: I do a lot of that.
Speaker 2: Which ones you want to shout them out?
Speaker 5: There are cave spiders in Texas, quite a few species
Speaker 5: that are only found in a single cave. There's actually
Speaker 5: a species called Sikurina boronia, which is from a single
Speaker 5: cave in downtown San Antonio. What that has now been
Speaker 5: covered with you know, concrete and culverts, and that species
Speaker 5: is almost certainly extinct, but you can't go into the
Speaker 5: cave any more, so we don't really know. That's kind
Speaker 5: of weird enough. Yeah, but there's a lot of Texas
Speaker 5: cave spiders that are endangered. And there's a special little
Speaker 5: micro tarantula that lives on mountain types in southern Appalasia
Speaker 5: that is also listed as endangered. And it's actually it
Speaker 5: lives in spruce fir forests on the very very tippy
Speaker 5: tops of mountains, and those spruce fir forests have declined
Speaker 5: because of invasive bugs.
Speaker 2: Well, according the paper assessing the impacts of balsam woody
Speaker 2: adulged and anthropogenic disturbance on the stand culture and mortality
Speaker 2: of Fraser fur in the Black Mountains, North Carolina, this
Speaker 2: small European wingless thing, and Adulga's name means invisible. It's
Speaker 2: actually not a bug. But we're going to forgive Marshall
Speaker 2: this time. We're all human, unless you're a spider who's
Speaker 2: like hate those balsam woody adulgens.
Speaker 5: So the forest kind of died off and that exposed
Speaker 5: the moss mats where the spider likes to live. But
Speaker 5: the kind of climate change scenarios for the future they
Speaker 5: don't bode well for that species. Oh man, this is
Speaker 5: going to get warmer and warmer, and then the forests
Speaker 5: that the spiders live in will actually go away mm hmm,
Speaker 5: and then the spiders might go away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so be kind to spiders. They've been through so much.
Speaker 2: But some species have been around for one hundred million
Speaker 2: years and evolution is an ongoing process, so we are
Speaker 2: rooting for them. What about pets spiders as pets? Shannon
Speaker 2: Cody wants to know do jumping spiders make good pets?
Speaker 2: Mouse Paxston wants to know if black widows are good
Speaker 2: pets in general? How do you feel about having pet tarantulas?
Speaker 5: Pet tarantulas are fine if the animals are bred in captivity,
Speaker 5: that's obviously a problem because they're often not, so then
Speaker 5: it becomes something that I'm strongly against. Obviously, people have
Speaker 5: pet bit of this jumping spiders that because fit if
Speaker 5: it's jumping spiders are big and they have a personality
Speaker 5: and they'll look at you. I mean, you have to
Speaker 5: be prepared for the fact that they're only going to
Speaker 5: live for a year or two, so they're going to
Speaker 5: die sooner or later. I mean black widows as a pet,
Speaker 5: that's it's interesting. They're actually really cool spiders.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're beautiful.
Speaker 5: They are quite beautiful. But I don't know. If I don't,
Speaker 5: I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.
Speaker 2: You mentioned something about jumping spiders having personality. Gena Ninja
Speaker 2: LB wants to know if they have feelings or show personalities.
Speaker 2: Jacob Shepherd do spiders have personalities? Earl of Gramulcan Mouse,
Speaker 2: Paxton David the Altruistic Missanthrope and Vanessa Adams all want
Speaker 2: to know little tiny personalities that you notice.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, for sure. Some people have actually studied whether
Speaker 5: or not individual spiders have different personalities. Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 2: And according to the twenty fourteen paper Animal Behavior Task
Speaker 2: Differentiation by personality in spider groups, the researchers support the
Speaker 2: idea that spiders have personalities. They looked at that in
Speaker 2: in cooperative spider that lives in colonies and share that
Speaker 2: quote certain individuals specialize in bringing the food while others
Speaker 2: rarely are never help out, which means, as spider's hypothesize,
Speaker 2: also talk shit about one another. And the paper continues
Speaker 2: with kind of a Carrie Bradshaw pondering what is it
Speaker 2: that predicts differential participation in this spider Individual personality is
Speaker 2: the answer. Individuals vary in their level of boldness and
Speaker 2: bolder spiders socialize in prey attack. What do the shy
Speaker 2: group members then do? And are the bold group members
Speaker 2: actually better at catching prey? These are still unanswered questions
Speaker 2: in social species. So yeah, when you kill a spider,
Speaker 2: you might be swatting at an asshole or like a
Speaker 2: really good guy. But speaking of culture, let's talk Australia.
Speaker 2: Jess See says, as an Australian, I wonder why we
Speaker 2: are so famous for our spider friends. Do Australian spiders
Speaker 2: deserve their reputation or are they unfairly maligned? And Nims
Speaker 2: wants to know why the preponderance of fvenomous spiders in
Speaker 2: Australia or big ones.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a preponderance. It's just the
Speaker 5: fact that they have members of a particular family that
Speaker 5: happen to be venomous, and there's quite a few species
Speaker 5: of that family, so it's kind of like just a
Speaker 5: historical accident. It's really just members of that one family
Speaker 5: that are medically dangerous. So if you took that family away,
Speaker 5: the Australian spider fauna and overall is not atypically dangerous.
Speaker 2: It's just that.
Speaker 5: And they're big. You know, they're Sitney funnel web spiders
Speaker 5: and their relatives.
Speaker 2: And this is the family ultracity. And if you live
Speaker 2: in or are going to Australia, do some research on
Speaker 2: who the baddies are down there, because a funnel web
Speaker 2: spider in Australia can kill ya. I'm just being honest.
Speaker 2: Now in North America again, funnel web spider has the
Speaker 2: unfortunate same name, but they are harmless, little grass spiders
Speaker 2: that make tubes out of silk. It's like having the
Speaker 2: same legal name as a serial killer and it's not fair.
Speaker 2: But in the popular Zeitgeist listener, analist de Young suggested
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixty seven children's book Be Nice to Spiders.
Speaker 2: Jinga Ninja Lb said, please see the book Ah Spider
Speaker 2: by Lydia Monks to help your fears. And many people.
Speaker 2: Danielle Suscher, Blake Bairard Mack and Adam Weaver mentioned the
Speaker 2: book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikowsky, and Adam said
Speaker 2: it's a beautiful sci fi novel and it involves some
Speaker 2: spider intelligence. Now, Timmy h and Emily Burns had Harry
Speaker 2: Potter admonishments for featuring a taless whip scorpion and calling
Speaker 2: it a spider. I also think that's egregious now. Patrons
Speaker 2: Rachel M and Amanik asked about the sweet sweet imagery
Speaker 2: of Lucas the Spider highly recommended Adorable Jumping Spider cartoon,
Speaker 2: and the Mary slav generously shared that years ago, I
Speaker 2: was bitten by a brown recluse on my scrotum, of
Speaker 2: all places, I never developed any spider power. Does that
Speaker 2: mean it was probably not radioactive? And other Spider Man questioned.
Speaker 2: Patrons such as and Jolly Himali and Andrew McVay wanted
Speaker 2: to know about spiders in the media. Is there any
Speaker 2: pop culture that gets it right? Charlotte's Webb, Children of Time,
Speaker 2: Harry Potter, Lucas Spider, Spider Man, anything that you go, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's cool.
Speaker 5: Charlotte's Web.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It kind of portrayed the spider as something that was
Speaker 5: interesting and complex and partly intelligent and kind of beautiful.
Speaker 5: So I like that the best. Okay, she was very sophisticated.
Speaker 2: I think that it shed some light on how artistic
Speaker 2: the webs are. Yeah, yeah, and how friendly they can be.
Speaker 5: I think everyone should go back and read Charlotte's web.
Speaker 5: It's just really cool.
Speaker 2: I agree. What about Deborah L. Blanton wants to know
Speaker 2: how do spiders hear? Do they have a sense of hearing?
Speaker 5: Yeah, they have little, tiny, very sensitive hairs that respond
Speaker 5: to those mechanical stimuli. So yes, there have been studies
Speaker 5: that have been shown that they can use their web
Speaker 5: as like a gigantic ear.
Speaker 2: So the sound vibrations.
Speaker 5: Yah, yeah, I know exactly, that's pretty spectacular.
Speaker 2: That's amazing. Aki wants to know do spiders communicate with
Speaker 2: each other? If so? How a popsicle Emperor wants to
Speaker 2: know do any spider's connected bond with other spiders? I
Speaker 2: imagine they have to because they're spider babies everywhere.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure they communicate. They communicate using vision, some of
Speaker 5: them they communicate using acoustics, sound vibrations, chemicals of multifaceted Yeah,
Speaker 5: they're communicating.
Speaker 2: Jenikamaki first time question asker asks if you've seen the
Speaker 2: picture of a big spider with a small frog and
Speaker 2: if they ever live in a symbiotic relationship. Have you
Speaker 2: ever seen that?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Yeah, I know there's a paper that talks about
Speaker 5: it's a South American tarantula and frog that have a
Speaker 5: symbiotic relationship. I believe it's a tarantula and frog, but yes, yeah,
Speaker 5: I love that.
Speaker 2: Please see the two thousand and eight study Commensalism in
Speaker 2: micro highland Frogs and megalomorph Spiders, which recounts that spiders
Speaker 2: and frogs, certain South Asian species that would normally fight
Speaker 2: and eat each other, were witnessed hanging out in the
Speaker 2: same burrow or living in the same tree hole. Why
Speaker 2: aren't these two fulfilling their evolutionary obligation of being enemies. Well,
Speaker 2: the paper notes that previous studies have found that certain
Speaker 2: tarantulas recognize frogs with some chemical cues, which prevents them
Speaker 2: from attacking this frog. They're like, this one's cool. The
Speaker 2: spider leaves some decaying remains of its prey, which attracts ants,
Speaker 2: and the frog eats the ants, and staying in the
Speaker 2: spider's burrow during the day keeps the frogs safe from
Speaker 2: the heat, and the frog eats the ants that would
Speaker 2: eat the spider's eggsact. So, yes, it's a commensal relationship.
Speaker 2: It benefits them both, But we can also call them
Speaker 2: best friends if we want, especially when the world feels
Speaker 2: like trash and we have to imagine them chilling in
Speaker 2: a hole together having a good time. Sebastian at Cheveri,
Speaker 2: who we have already spoken about. Sebastian's on here, wants
Speaker 2: to know weirdes spider go weirdest spider?
Speaker 5: Is this whole thing live?
Speaker 2: It's not no.
Speaker 5: Weirdest spider. I mean, spinning spiders are pretty awesome and
Speaker 5: kind of weird.
Speaker 2: Spitting spiders where are they spitting?
Speaker 5: They spit a combination of glue and venom. Oh if
Speaker 5: there were a lot of spitting spiders, or if spitting
Speaker 5: spiders were bigger, then they would be pretty scary.
Speaker 2: What happens with the glue and the venom?
Speaker 5: They spit sticky glue and immobilizes their prey. If you
Speaker 5: look at a slow mode video of the spinning spider,
Speaker 5: it's moving its challisserae like in a zig zag pattern. Huh.
Speaker 5: The glue comes out literally.
Speaker 2: Like this Marshall kind of motioned some finger guns and it.
Speaker 5: Just sticks to like a like a fly or something.
Speaker 2: It's a rad that's like a wonder woman.
Speaker 5: Like, yeah, exactly. The true spider man would be like
Speaker 5: a tarantula that has foot silk.
Speaker 2: Does it ever make you mad that Spider Man doesn't
Speaker 2: spin webs out his butt.
Speaker 5: Nope.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine a couple of spinnerettes down there, just
Speaker 2: a hole in his body suit? Well, that'd be so great.
Speaker 2: What's with his wrists? Can you have come out the
Speaker 2: other end? Baby, that's the business end of it. Toby
Speaker 2: Maguire's like, not, well, I'm playing Spider Man. Let's talk
Speaker 2: about repellance, some people said, Meghan Walker, Robin r Michael Anderson,
Speaker 2: Danielle at Napoleano, Clara Mauer, and Robert Odette. Robert has
Speaker 2: a boatload of catface spiders in the back of their
Speaker 2: rental home and flag staff. They keep knocking down webbs.
Speaker 2: Me and Walker wants to know. Is there actually some
Speaker 2: essential oil or other substances that act as spider repellent
Speaker 2: or do they not care about that stuff. I've heard
Speaker 2: that peppermint oil is not something spider's like if you
Speaker 2: wanted to aromatically discourage them from taking presidence in your
Speaker 2: ear canal or something.
Speaker 5: This is not something that I have done any research on.
Speaker 5: Not interested in repelling them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're like, that's not a problem. I had come
Speaker 2: to my office.
Speaker 5: Hours riders interested in the opposite.
Speaker 2: And in case you were not, Marshall, I looked into
Speaker 2: this for you and according to the twenty eighteen paper,
Speaker 2: natural compounds as spider repellents factor myth. Volatiles released by
Speaker 2: mint oil and chestnuts may be effective into turring spider
Speaker 2: settlement in two different families of spiders. But lemon oil
Speaker 2: as a repellent is a myth. So roasted chestnuts, mint
Speaker 2: lemon cocktails. Maybe you're hungry. We're going to fix that
Speaker 2: because Ali Brown, Alan Ally and Julian and Hailey Kirby asked,
Speaker 2: in Haley's words, will spiders crawl into our mouths as
Speaker 2: we sleep? Or is this just an irrational fear? Have
Speaker 2: you ever heard the myth that you swallow eight spiders
Speaker 2: a year?
Speaker 5: I think I've heard that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know where they got that. That doesn't
Speaker 2: happen though, right.
Speaker 5: I think that's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if you need proof, you can see the
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen piece believing that humans swallow spiders in their
Speaker 2: sleep false beliefs as side effects of the processes that
Speaker 2: support accurate knowledge, which explains that there was a rumor
Speaker 2: that this rumor began in the early nineteen nineties as
Speaker 2: a columnist named Lisa Burgett Holst warned about the dangers
Speaker 2: of misinformation spreading the email and used this particular example
Speaker 2: as a sad illustration of how we sometimes do not
Speaker 2: use our brains to question pretty much anything. Now, twenty
Speaker 2: years after Snopes explained that and gave the source, Snopes
Speaker 2: confessed that they made up the journalist and that entire backstory.
Speaker 2: And in fact, Lisa burget Holst is an anagram for
Speaker 2: this is a big troll, And it was all in
Speaker 2: April Fool's Day prank that they waited decades to reveal.
Speaker 2: At the spider's expense, mind you, so please tell us
Speaker 2: everyone you know that you do not swallow any spiders
Speaker 2: in your sleep, probably every year, or you know, two
Speaker 2: per season. Oh, speaking of seasons. Trista Algar first in question,
Speaker 2: Asker and Sarah Meaden and Kieran want to know where
Speaker 2: do spiders go in the winter.
Speaker 5: Depends on their lifestyle. If they're a trapped or spider
Speaker 5: that lives for forty five years, they don't go anywhere chilling.
Speaker 5: They just do what they do. In fact, they like
Speaker 5: the winter. Like a California trap or spider. They live
Speaker 5: for the winter. During the summer, they actually take silk
Speaker 5: and they close their burrow. They seal it shut from
Speaker 5: the inside to kind of retain moisture. And they know
Speaker 5: that they're not really going to eat during the summer,
Speaker 5: so they live for the winter. But then like a
Speaker 5: little jumping spider that lives on the slopes of Mount
Speaker 5: Shasta that's covered in snow in the winter, Let's say
Speaker 5: they've made it in the spring, then there's little babies.
Speaker 5: The little babies are kind of getting bigger over the summer,
Speaker 5: and then when the fall comes, they just go down
Speaker 5: into the leaf litter or whatever and build a little
Speaker 5: silken cocoon and hunker down.
Speaker 2: They just chill in a sleeping bag.
Speaker 5: It depends on what their life history is.
Speaker 2: Man, if you could knit your own kevlar sleeping bag
Speaker 2: camp over winter.
Speaker 5: There are spiders that live on sand duns in California,
Speaker 5: and they during the day, they come out and they
Speaker 5: sit on the sand dune. But when it's time for
Speaker 5: them to go to bed, they flip on their back
Speaker 5: and they start spinning silk. They start spinning in a circle.
Speaker 5: They make a little sleeping bag, and then they actually
Speaker 5: pull it over themselves and then the sand just covers them.
Speaker 5: Isn't that radical?
Speaker 2: That's so cute? And speaking of hiding, Liz Cleland and
Speaker 2: Jeff Stumpo had reclusive questions. Do you have any myths
Speaker 2: about the brown recluse that you'd like to bust? Mary
Speaker 2: Slay says years ago, I was bitten by a brown
Speaker 2: recluse on my scrotum, of all places. I never developed
Speaker 2: any spider powers, which means it probably was not radioactive.
Speaker 2: But anything about brown recluse that you want to clear up.
Speaker 2: In the southern southeast United States, they are endemic there,
Speaker 2: but everyone freaks out whenever they see any spider that's brown,
Speaker 2: that's a brown recluse. Is it really the venom or
Speaker 2: is it a staph infection that'll get you from that?
Speaker 5: Oh? It's probably a combination of both. Okay, I mean,
Speaker 5: they certainly have chemicals in their venom that cause your
Speaker 5: cells to die. But most importantly, for people that live
Speaker 5: in the Western United States, there basically are none of
Speaker 5: those spiders. There are no established populations of those reckless spiders.
Speaker 5: There are native species that are found out in the desert,
Speaker 5: but those are not brown recluse. So effectively, all brown
Speaker 5: recluse bites that are diagnosed as such in the Western
Speaker 5: United States are misdiagnoses, and that's problematic because then you're
Speaker 5: not really doing what you should do.
Speaker 2: They're misdiagnosed because they're a skin infection of another.
Speaker 5: Kind, that's right, and then the treatment plan is not
Speaker 5: what it should be. Yeah, because it's not a reckless bite,
Speaker 5: it's something else.
Speaker 2: So many people think they get spider bites, but I understand,
Speaker 2: and a lot of those are just straight up staff
Speaker 2: infection from a cut exactly. Yeah, that happened to me
Speaker 2: Where I thought I got a spider bite. It turns
Speaker 2: out I was just hauling wood literally gave myself an infection.
Speaker 2: They went into my veins. Oh sorry, huge, huge PSA
Speaker 2: from your dad. Word, if you have a red welt
Speaker 2: on your skin and it's growing and it starts to
Speaker 2: trace up your veins, go to the er, like immediately,
Speaker 2: do not fuck around, do not find out, do not
Speaker 2: pass go drop what you're doing, because that can be
Speaker 2: a blood infection and you might need antibiotics. Now, it
Speaker 2: happened to me, But the point is that a lot
Speaker 2: of times spider bite air quotes is blamed when really
Speaker 2: you just have an infection from a nick or a scrape,
Speaker 2: and spiders are like, hey, here's an idea. Take a
Speaker 2: shower and clean your wounds and stop blaming us for
Speaker 2: your blood infections. I don't even touch you. But like
Speaker 2: people see a big welt in an infection, they think
Speaker 2: a spider must have done this to you, and it's like, no,
Speaker 2: you may be caught yourself on a fence or something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a medical misdiagnosis problem.
Speaker 2: It's not. I'm telling you, spider. There needs to be
Speaker 2: more spider integration in our culture. There does, and the
Speaker 2: first thing is combating fear. So last listener question I
Speaker 2: have is Britney Ross, first time question asker, also an
Speaker 2: admitted arachnophobe. What are some qualities with spiders that are endearing?
Speaker 2: I have learned to find jumping spiders cute now they say,
Speaker 2: but help me love the less quote adorable spiders. Lauren
Speaker 2: RR says, besides raising the next generation to not be
Speaker 2: afraid of spiders, how can we help shift the narrative
Speaker 2: away from fear toward respect and appreciation. I will add
Speaker 2: that they so deserve, of course, literally fifty of you,
Speaker 2: gentle souls asked how to overcome your fear of spiders?
Speaker 2: But I'm going to shout out just the first time
Speaker 2: question askers Mark Payton, Jasmine si Rowan Tree, Helena, and
Speaker 2: Felix Cosmo. And here I would like to quote Chief
Speaker 2: Dan George of the Slawatu nation, who said, if you
Speaker 2: talk to the animals, they will talk with you and
Speaker 2: you will know each other. If you do not talk
Speaker 2: to them, you will not know them. And what you
Speaker 2: do not know, you will fear. What one fears one destroys.
Speaker 5: Well, I would just say that, I mean, everyone kind
Speaker 5: of needs to open their eyes to everything. It's kind
Speaker 5: of a general problem we have in our society. People
Speaker 5: are kind of too close minded right about everything. But
Speaker 5: I mean spiders they mostly eat insects. They're important in
Speaker 5: that way. Their silks are spectacular, strongest things ever, right,
Speaker 5: their strongest biomaterials known to man. Just crazy. They have
Speaker 5: intricate biologies. You just have to want to learn a
Speaker 5: little bit more about all spiders. And once you start
Speaker 5: learning more about them, they're They're cool animals that have
Speaker 5: really cool lifestyles.
Speaker 2: I think the less anthrocentric we are, perhaps we start
Speaker 2: thinking of what is the spider going to do to
Speaker 2: me that spider probably doesn't give a shit about you
Speaker 2: unless it thinks you're going to kill it, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. You just have to kind
Speaker 5: of think of them as little animals doing their thing, right,
Speaker 5: and then they're doing their thing and much interesting ways,
Speaker 5: using silk in particular the cool.
Speaker 2: Just appreciate them as critters.
Speaker 5: Yeah right. If you have to say what good do
Speaker 5: they do for humanity? Which I don't think you have to.
Speaker 5: You can just appreciate them for themselves. But for humanity,
Speaker 5: they are providing all of this natural insect biocontrol. That's
Speaker 5: what they do. They eat insects, But beyond that, they
Speaker 5: make these silks that we can use for other things.
Speaker 5: And they're actually their venoms are actually used for therapeutics.
Speaker 5: So they have a lot of potential to directly impact
Speaker 5: humanity positively. We just have to be open to it.
Speaker 2: Not to mention what would Halloween be without them? Come on,
Speaker 2: it's my favorite, my favorite Spider season. What about the one?
Speaker 2: Last two questions? I always ask the hardest thing about
Speaker 2: your job, most annoying thing about being an aerachnologist. It
Speaker 2: could be anything. It can be petty. It can be big.
Speaker 2: It could be the fact that people hate spiders. Whatever.
Speaker 5: I don't see it that way. Yeah, yeah, I have
Speaker 5: an awesome job.
Speaker 2: There's got to be one thing. I ask you your
Speaker 2: favorite after this, But there's got to be one thing
Speaker 2: that sucks about your job. Is it parking on campus?
Speaker 2: Because that's what I think sucks the most about your job.
Speaker 5: I don't like to complain about my position. I'm very fortunate.
Speaker 5: I don't see it that way.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Now, I love not a single complaint from someone
Speaker 2: who works with spiders. This is the first time in
Speaker 2: three hundred and fifty episodes anyone's ever said I don't
Speaker 2: have a single complaint, and you're the guy that works
Speaker 2: with spiders. I think that should tell people a lot
Speaker 2: that you're not like I hate it when spiders assault
Speaker 2: me in some way.
Speaker 5: Doesn't hap well, that doesn't happen to me. And if
Speaker 5: people don't like spiders, that doesn't annoy me. I mean,
Speaker 5: I think it's like an opportunity for me to maybe
Speaker 5: help them get over that. I don't get upset about
Speaker 5: that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: You're a bigger person than me, because if someone doesn't
Speaker 2: like spiders, I feel like I want to sit them
Speaker 2: down and lecture. What about your favorite thing?
Speaker 5: My favorite thing about my job? H I mean I
Speaker 5: love I kind of love everything about it. I get
Speaker 5: to go into the field a lot, and the field
Speaker 5: is wonderful. I really like to teach, so I get
Speaker 5: to teach a lot in my position. It's inspiring for
Speaker 5: me to try to inspire other people. Kind of a
Speaker 5: beautiful thing. Fundamentally. I love learning about biodiversity. I kind
Speaker 5: of think of it as I'm trying to explore and
Speaker 5: discover and describe the biological world around me. Really not
Speaker 5: for people, but for like this greater thing. It's weird.
Speaker 5: I don't know how to describe it.
Speaker 2: That's an important purpose, right.
Speaker 5: I like a if there was like a spider god,
Speaker 5: they would smile upon my actions. Yeah. I think it
Speaker 5: is really important to kind of learn stuff now and
Speaker 5: pass it on to the next generation. And it's not
Speaker 5: even that. It's just kind of telling the stories of
Speaker 5: the spiders that the spiders can't tell the stories themselves,
Speaker 5: so I kind of help the spiders tell their story.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful that you're an advocate and that you're literally
Speaker 2: helping them be seen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, exactly, that's it helping them be seen, right,
Speaker 5: Like there's a new species that lives up by Kernville,
Speaker 5: but no one knew about it, But now they know
Speaker 5: about it because I kind of I found them and
Speaker 5: wrote a paper about them.
Speaker 2: You are the pr that they need.
Speaker 5: That's right, That's right, And it's not about me. That's
Speaker 5: That's the other thing I don't I don't really care.
Speaker 5: I mean, I don't do this for myself. I'm doing
Speaker 5: it for this this greater good, right. But I'm really
Speaker 5: fortunate to have a job that allows me to do that. Well.
Speaker 2: Same, I'm lucky that I get to tell people about
Speaker 2: what you know about spiders. They appreciate them. I'm going
Speaker 2: to send you some pictures of the spiders that cohabitate
Speaker 2: in my office. Okay, I'll let you know who's in.
Speaker 5: There chain then mo for me. That's right. Find as
Speaker 5: many as you want.
Speaker 2: So ask spider people, not smart questions, because oh the stories.
Speaker 2: You thought a spider was an anonymous little being invented
Speaker 2: by Ghoul to destroy your sanity. But the joke's on
Speaker 2: you because they are vast, colorful, cute, smart, and they
Speaker 2: eat roaches for you. And ninety nine point nine eight
Speaker 2: percent of them are harmless if I did that math
Speaker 2: right now. You can find out more about doctor Hadeen
Speaker 2: at the links in the show notes, as well as
Speaker 2: the cause he chose. We are at ologies on Blue
Speaker 2: Sky and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both,
Speaker 2: and we do have those shorter kid friendly episodes called
Speaker 2: Smologies in their own feed, which is linked in the
Speaker 2: show notes. You can get merch at ologiesmerch dot com,
Speaker 2: and to submit your questions before we record, you can
Speaker 2: sign up at patreon dot com Sashologies. Thank you to
Speaker 2: BFFs and s Kindergarten, Aaron Talbert for admitting Theologies podcast
Speaker 2: Facebook group, and her and Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis
Speaker 2: for their support as I'm off to shoot tomorrow. Aveline
Speaker 2: Malick makes the professional transcripts Kelly ar Dwired does a website.
Speaker 2: Noel Dilworth is our nimble scheduling producer. Susan Hale our
Speaker 2: managing director. Overseas it all with only two eyes. Jake
Speaker 2: Chafe weaves it all together as an editor and slinging
Speaker 2: the sticky bits is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.
Speaker 2: Nick Thorburn wrote art theme music, And if you stick
Speaker 2: around it till the very end of the episode, I
Speaker 2: tell you secret. This week, I will tell you that
Speaker 2: I just got back from rehearsal tonight at thirty Rock
Speaker 2: and which, by the way, I got into a cab
Speaker 2: and I was like, is it thirty Rockefeller Center or
Speaker 2: is it just called thirty Rock? I don't know how
Speaker 2: to tell, So I was like, thirty Rock, And then
Speaker 2: I was like, is that douchey, like when people call
Speaker 2: San Francisco Frisco. I don't know. Don't tell me because
Speaker 2: I can't change it now. Then anyway, I was at
Speaker 2: thirty Rockefeller or whatever. I was at the studios and
Speaker 2: I was practicing and stuff, and I spent also the
Speaker 2: day holding this huge taless whip scorpion and mantids and
Speaker 2: these little tiny fast roaches, and tomorrow I'll be handling
Speaker 2: a tarantula too. And if you asked me if I
Speaker 2: would rather have giant, leggy, spiny insects and spiders on
Speaker 2: my skin on essentially live TV, or sing karaoke in
Speaker 2: any random bar, it would be the roaches and the
Speaker 2: spiders on me. On television. Karaoke terrifies me. Can't do it.
Speaker 2: Which means I should do it and I should get
Speaker 2: it over with. That is the lesson we learned today. Okay,
Speaker 2: thank you for being here. You did great. All right,
Speaker 2: but right pacodermatology, hobology, cryptozoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, feratology, anthology, seriology, selology.
Speaker 2: Trust me, Wilbur.
Speaker 3: People are very gullible.
Speaker 1: They'll believe anything they see in print.
Speaker 7: Hey Mark, how are you?
Speaker 5: I'm not great sore throat.
Speaker 1: I think I'm coming down to cold.
Speaker 7: Oh no, you should try a Vogel sore throat spray.
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Speaker 7: treat symptoms of coals and flus, including source throats.
Speaker 4: Perfect.
Speaker 5: I give that a try.
Speaker 7: So we leave soort throats symptoms with a vogel A
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Speaker 7: and designed to reach irritated parts of the throat, available
Speaker 7: from health stores and pharmacies nationwide. Always read the leaflet.