Time was, I was just as irrationally terrified of spiders as anyone else. When I was maybe 6, I was CONVINCED that a black widow lived under this weird circular patch on the floor of our bathroom and would bite me if it could and I would immediately die and have to be buried. It wasn't until I started college that I started to gain a new-found appreciation for arthropods in general and spiders in specific. Ironic that my first damn day at an arts school was the same day I started down this crazy road of trying to get into a damn science program at a state school.
Fucking Art Institute.
But anyway, I remember picking up a copy of Life in the Undergrowth, the companion book to Attenborough's documentary, at Powell's Technical whilst there with my dumb buds Micah and Lindall. It captured my attention, and set off a chain reaction. All through my employment at the zoo and Best Buy, I would bring in library books on sharks, or ants, or crustaceans, or deep-sea vents; all kinds of stuff that I was interested in during high school but had never really appeared on my radar before. But spiders really took the cake as the creatures towards whom my attitude changed the most, and this made me realize that the best antidote to irrational terror (or indeed, irrational anything) is education.
In the interest of maybe sharing this lessening of fear with at least one other person on the planet, permit me to talk about some cool spider stuff. I'll put a break here and throw up a cursory warning that there will be spider pictures following it, but really, you should take a look even if they freak you out. It's all about learning, dawg.
My absolute favorite family of spiders are the Salticidae, or jumping spiders.
Also, did I mention their adorable mating dance? It's amazing.
(I would love to credit these but I saved them so long ago that I can't recall the origin, beyond possibly the Something Awful forums. If you know the provenance of these gifs, please e-mail me or whatever!)
I'm also quite fond of tarantulas; in this case, of course, I mean the family of big hairy spiders, Theraphosidae, not the wimpier European spiders to whom the name was originally applied.
When most people think of spiders, this is among the first images dredged from their terrified psyche as the bastard child of their darkest fever-dreams. I am reminded of a scene from Disney's Something Wicked This Way Comes in which the insufferable child stars are being attacked by swarms of big, black tarantulas. But man, it's really obvious that the poor spiders are fighting as hard as they can to get away from those big stompy meat-on-the-outside types. It's like watching a movie in which the actors are in a room full of timid baby rabbits, each trying as hard as possible to escape, while the two human actors shriek in very real fear.
Theraphosidae are huge and hairy, and that seems to be the origin of some people's revulsion for them. Indeed, they can bite (usually no more dangerous than a bee sting, though unless I'm much mistaken allergies to tarantula venom can cause symptoms as severe as those to bee venom) and they do like to kick off their little urcitating hairs at potential predators, but their gentle stumbliness and fuzziness makes them, at least to my eyes, endearing. Also, they kind of remind me of elephants up-close for some reason.
While not actually spiders, another of my arthropodal favorites are related to spiders as fellow arachnids: the Amblypygids.
Fearsome looking trapjaws notwithstanding, these little (actually fairly large) critters have actually been shown to take part in complex social behavior, including extended parent-offspring care. Mothers of some Amblypygid species are known to use their whip-like, elongated second set of legs to gently stroke their agitated children, and offspring from the same litter placed in an unfamiliar environment seek each other out for comfort.
Personally, I think these creatures are beautiful in a strange and otherworldly way. They exhibit so many strange specializations while still being obviously arachnid, and they are impeccably adapted for their preferred habitat of dry cave walls.
Well that was mostly spider-related, though I did go off topic a bit there. Either way, educational stuff. I hope that maybe somebody out there finds these little buggers just a bit less repellent, and maybe even finds them as fascinating and endearing as I do. It's a shame to me that human beings exhibit such a self-focused bias, having difficulty empathizing with or appreciating the value of anything that doesn't at least superficially resemble them, but that's an article for another time.
(I definitely went a bit Google-happy with the images there. If I posted your image, and you don't want it up, drop me a line and I'll swap it out for some other poor slob's image. And if he objects, I'll swap his out for yet another rube! It's an unending chain.)
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