Cool language of webs
Oliver Rackham
THE BOOK OF THE SPIDER: FROM ARACHNOPHOBIA TO THE LOVE OF SPIDERS by Paul Hillyard Hutchinson, £16.99, pp. 196 Over the years I have had plenty of fun with spiders. It began when my mother told me about little money-spiders and how to induce them to bring good luck; and showed me the beauty of orb-webs, with their wonderful avoidance of boring regu- larity. One of my grandfather's travel books raised my infant hair with an account of the kitten-sized yagi of New Guinea, whose bite turns the victim into a 'frenzied madman'. (Is this one of the many tall stories told about spiders?) When I stayed in France my hosts would summon me to catch and remove the great bath-spiders that they were so frightened of (`Tiens! — he's picked it up and it hasn't bitten him!'). I once found an extraordinary ecosystem of nothing but bluebottles and spiders that had been building up for two centuries in the narrow space between a Cornish church window and the back of the organ. I cherish the thought that I may have been bitten while asleep by the legendary and elusive rogalidha spider of Crete: maybe that is another tall story, but the effects lasted ten days.
This is a wonderful book by the country's leading arachnologist. He deals partly with the biology of spiders, especially silk- production, web-making, flying, and husband-eating, but also with all that is bizarre and romantic about them and those who have studied them.
Spiders are all carnivores: there are cockroach-eaters, scorpion-eaters, rattle- snake-eaters, and fish-eaters; there are bird-eating tarantulas and tarantula-eating wasps. Some are choosy: we are told of a trap-door spider that grabs passing beetles and lets them go if they are the wrong sort of beetle.
People eat shrimps, so why not spiders? Paul Hillyard gives several recipes for tarantulas, which are a normal article of diet in various tropical countries. It has been claimed that eating spiders adds ten years to the eater's life. He reveals that Little Miss Muffet may have been the daughter of a doctor who prescribed spiders externally and internally. Nearly all spiders are venomous. A few foreign species poison horses, camels, and people, though not often: 'It is not always easy to make the black-widow bite'. Seventeenth-century southern Europe had an obsession with tarantulas: anyone bitten was supposed to die either laughing or cry- ing, unless cured either by uttering obscene language or by dancing the tarantella. (It was probably black-widow spiders, not tarantulas, that did the biting, unless the whole obsession was founded on a tall story.) Spiders have seldom been used by murderers — though did not Watson in the Sherlock Holmes apocrypha once have to shoot a spider, 'the horror of the Cuban forests', belonging to a notorious canary- trainer?
What else can one do with spiders? Take big ones for a walk on a lead (as in Brazil), or induce them to spin fishing-nets (as in New Guinea), or use them to catch flies (as in South Africa). Their silk can be used for cross-hairs in optical instruments, or for dressing wounds, or for making see- through or bullet-proof clothing. Spiders inspired scientists including Aristotle and Darwin. New Guinea is evidently the great land of them, but they had a particular fascination for zoologists in tropical South America. Maria Sibylla Merian first depicted the bird- eaters in 17th-century Surinam, but for 100 years she was thought to be telling a tall story. This is a vividly-written, light-hearted and well-illustrated book. The author claims that spiders are 'damned interest- ing'. Indeed they are.
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