I Was Eaten by a Giant Spider

It was atomic age panic, right, Yeah, giant animals exactly right. So there's nuclear testing, there's atomic radiation, and suddenly animals become very big. And one of the animals they would make very big, you know quite well, was the spider. That's right. I mean with all of them, all you need is a little camera magic, and you can make anything look big. You didn't have to worry about having some sort of fancy stop motion creature. You didn't have

to worry certainly with c g I or costumes. You're just an actual spider. Yeah, film a tarantula and then put it in the background, you know, superimposed with the different sizes. Yeah, But so there's a sequence and pretty much all these movies. I probably haven't seen them all, but I've seen some of them where the spider lives in a cave or something like that, and the people are wandering near the cave and then somebody falls into its web and the web is a hammock. It's just

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

never see right now. Often the person gets away. If the person gets eaten by the giant spider, we just sort of see like a ah, and then the spiders approaching. The music swells in. That's it. What happens after that cutaway? Well, sometimes we find their bones later, sometimes their their their cocoon body shows up later. But I can't think of a film off hand that had a prolonged spider cut

death by spider death scene. I guess they really didn't go for the intense, gross outgore scenes like that in the nineteen fifties. But even if they did, what would they be showing what actually happens when a spider eats something at that scale? And that's going to be the topic of today's conversation. So we're gonna imagine a nineteen fifties Roger Corman atomic radiation movie, but we're gonna take it to the next level and go beyond that cut away. The movie is I was eaten by a giant spider.

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

a really great MST episode. They they used actual spiders, as I recall, and there's a there's this like really gross kind of hillbilly character in it, and giant spiders and somebody drives a car into a giant spider. How big are the giant spiders? They are like construction equipment big like, so they're ridiculous in terms of size. Um. You know, another one I remember from Mystery Science Theater three thousand is the I think Horrors of Spider Island.

That's a good one. That one. That one's one that was like it was black and white. It's just a real sleezy feel to it because it's like a bunch of babes and like one very greased up muscleman that are trapped in the island. He turned. It's it's like a it's like a dude who has a bunch of ladies who work on some nightclub act and they crash on a spider island. I haven't seen that one, fairly contrived.

Come on, I haven't seen that one in years, but I do remember, like it's a sweaty looking movie, and I remember watching it on VHS and a very sweaty college dorm. So it's just like I'm just sitting there sweating at night, get my night sweats on, and here's this just sweaty, weird, oppressive movie. Now, of course, another big point that I'm sure a lot of you listening right now are screaming. Is she labbed from Lord of the Rings. I remember that from the movies. But can

I can I admit a little secret good? I've never actually read the Lord of the Rings books in full. I probably like the only nerd around here who would admit that and expect to get out alive. Well, they're good? Is that a call? I? I can't read them again until, you know, maybe I'll read them with my son or something.

But I kept telling myself, I'll read them again when I get the film adaptation is kind of out of my head because I don't want to read them again and have those visuals and informant, though the visuals were often very good. In fact, I would say that the giant spider she loved in the first Lord of the

Ring film, I think the second, the third one. The third one I can't remember because I can't remember where that where she shows up in the she shows us versus the movies in the third movie when the Hobbits are here, we can okay, So the Hobbits are in more door, the evil land where you know they're towards the end of their journey, but a big spider attacks. Okay, I guess it was the third movie. It's the movie is kind of blurred together for me, but but I

thought that that scene was fabulous. Like the spider the computer animated is just perfect. Yeah, it's like it's basically a huge tarantula. We also, though in Lord of the Rings, never see exactly what would happen if the spider began to feed. We see it bite somebody and cocoon them,

but it never starts to eat anybody. I have a vague memory that the cinematic version of Sheilab also had confusing anatomy, but there were there were aspects about it, and certainly it's perfectly fine for a monster spider from a fantasy uh product to have monstrous features that don't line up with with actual real world spider biology. Like I think she had a stinger or something. Maybe there was some positor acually, I'm not sure what. Yeah, stinger

where like the silk spin orrets should have been. Yeah, I remember she kind of like uh pegged Sam with it at and that was kind of strange. But yeah, okay, here's another one that I remember but not very well. Doesn't doesn't Tim Curry turn into a spider at the end of the movie? It? Yes, the uh, the the nine TV miniseries. Uh, if you're like me, you probably

have fun and disturbing memories of this. Uh, this is a book I read, probably too early, and then that film came out, And of course Tim Curry is perfect as Pennywise, the dancey clown and traumatized the whole generation. Yeah, as we've said on this show before, any movie that Tim Curry's in, he's the best part. Try to think

of a counter example. You can't. Yeah, he was great and and particularly he was great in the first half of that mini series, which was mostly the kid's stuff, and that was the most effective part of that mini series. I think the second part not as strong, and it did include a big showdown with with it in a giant alien spider form. Actually just looked it up on YouTube and watched it before we came in here, and uh, it's it's an impressive looking spider. It looks like a

large animatronic kind of spider. So I don't know if it's really terrifying, but it is kind of a neat design. Okay, definitely come out of a drain or something. They go into a cave and then it has like it it shines, it's dead lights through its u Torso I should I should do some sort of like a monster the wheat breakdown of it on the blog because it's an interesting looking credit, but probably not another non scientifically perfect spider. Yeah, even less so. And you know it's a it's a creature.

It's like out from the Toto's Darkness or whatever, so you know it's it can get away with being completely alien. But there are plenty of other cinematic giant spiders that are look more like spiders, behave more like spiders. I instantly think of Krul. Of course, there's a fabulous sequence in there with a spider like she's like a spider queen, and they're giant spiders all along the web and there's a lot of the adventuring party has to make their way across it gets stuck on a hammock? Is it

basically a hammock? And Krall I think think that I want to remember it being a little more believable than that because so many of the effects and Kral are pretty top notch, but but I don't specifically remember. I think it was a stop motion spider though I see you have a note here Robert about an ewalk adventure. Yes, so, um, we have a lot of Star Wars fans in the office. Um, or at least we have Holly, and Holly is enough of a Star Wars fan to like represent multiple people.

I think she's like she is. She's a true mendous Star Wars fan, and I know that she has a warm spound her heart for these as well. Some people don't care for him. But there were a couple of live action Ewok made for TV films that came out. The first one was Urs Caravan of Courage and Ewok Adventure, and that one features a giant some giant spiders on a web. It's been a long time since I've seen that one, and I remember it being good but also kind of traumatic because there's a lot of like people

losing their family members in it. Um. But then there's also a follow up. I think it's the Battle for Indoor, and that one's that I have a lot of fun memories of that one. Would watch that one over and over again VHS because it has essentially orcs in it. It has an evil, uh seductive like raven queen who can turn herself into a raven with a magic ring.

There's a there's a crash spaceship and it's pilot is Wilford Brimley, who so it's a it's a true that that's tremendous film too, but only the first one has a giant spider and finally a more recent giant spider. Not two giants, but giant enough to be disturbing. If anyone out there is currently watching the latest season of Black Mirror on Netflix, the second episode, I believe is is wonderful horror Halloween viewing, and does include a scene with a monstrous spider, But I say, I'm gonna have

to check that out this weekend. Anyway, I wanted to move on to the next thing, which is that today we are going to be talking about people getting eaten by giant spiders. But uh, I want to frame this with a reminder that it is simply wrong in my point of view to contribute to global spider panic, and I will not allow us to contribute to global spider panic, even if only by accident. Spiders are not your enemy.

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

a world without spiders utterly intolerable. They make it okay for us to live on this planet. Now, now, Joe, I know some people are thinking right now and maybe even writing the email. They're gonna say, Hey, what about the black woodow spiders and the brown reclusives that live in my shed? Should I not kill those on site? Should I allow those? Why do you need to kill them? I don't know. I mean a lot of people would argue that is saying, I this is my shed, this

is where I go to get my tools. I don't want to grab a hoe and then have a black woo spider stingy. Well, I don't know're not sting me rather but bite me? Sting still with his little stick to my brain. I mean, I guess I can't argue with what you do in your shed, but but I I don't. We do not want to push an anti spider message here. Spy piers, spiders perform essential services for human beings and really all the other creatures on Earth.

I would say one of the primary things is insectivorous services. So spiders are primary predators that prey on insects. Imagine a world in which the primary control on insect populations is gone. You know, we've just squashed them all because we didn't like the way they looked, or we were

afraid of them, or something like that. I found one article that interviewed the arachnologist Norman I. Platinik, who works at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which is probably the coolest place I went this year. Um and Platinum speculates that if spiders were to disappear from the Earth, it's likely that human beings would face famine. He says, without spiders, all of our crops would be consumed by these pests, the pests that are primarily controlled

by spider predation. So it's hard to know for sure what would happen in these weird hypothetical scenarios with ecology, but I think that's a pretty safe bet to uh. And you know, when it comes back to come back to black widows for instance, sure you don't want to be they become bitten by one, but that black widow is there because their insects to eat, so she's doing

a service. And if you're concerned about their being an imbalance here with too many black widows around, then I think one possible solution would be just don't knock down those dirt daver wasp nests because they in turn prey on the spiders are that bring them back to their nests anyway for their their brood to emerge from and consume.

So allow the web of life to work itself exactly exactly, and the wasp nous of life to work it I must add too, as in accordance with the research that I that I was working on for this episode, even most black widow spider bites today do not result in death. Like, you don't want to be bitten by a black widow, but if you get if you get a black widow bite,

seek medical attention, you will probably be all right. I think I read that since nineteen seventy it's been like one scent or less of people bitten by black widows end up dying. And I think I've also read that every night the average person consumes twenty seven black widow spiders just in the course of sleeping. The crawl right in there. That is a true fact. That's where we get essential vitamins and minerals. All right, So, what are

some other reasons that we should keep the old arachnets around? Well, beyond the fact that animals deserve to live for their own sake, they are useful to us for plenty of other reasons. Spiders have a lot of biommetic technological uses that people are learning more and more about all the time. One of the things would be their silk, for example. Yeah, indeed, we we have to have an older episode that they just rolls through all the various ways and reasons that

we're trying to steal the secret of the silk. And really, I mean it goes back to ancient mythology to um, was it Arachney who lost the bet? A weaving bet with the gods or looming? I guess we're using a loom, but at any rate, Uh, Yeah, the silk of the spider is an amazing material, a true meta material. Um. They have special glands that secrete silk proteins dissolved in a water based solution, and the spider pushes the liquid solution through long ducts. These ducts leaved him lead to

microscopic spigots on the spiders spinnerets, spigots. Don't you wish you had spigots and and uh and generally there are two or three spinner at pairs located at the rear of the abdomen. Furthermore, each spigot has a valve that controls the thickness and speed of the excruted material. So the idea here is that when we're talking about the silk of a spider, it's not just that they have a little spool of thread in there, or that it's

just you know, a silly string type situation. There is a manipulation of these of these proteins and the there's a an actual weaving that takes place. They're forming a material and they act The exact form of the material will vary depending on what they're using the silk for. I mean, even with with one spider individual, they may may be producing various versions of the product depending on

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

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

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

because it's it's like a perfect material. It's it's strong, but it's flexible. Um. It's organic in nature, so you can use it in various bio medical properties. You can use it. There are a lot of potential applications and artificial limbs, artificial tissues, artificial tissues, scaffolding. UM. Have also read possible for parachuting, like really anywhere you could use

a really remarkable, strong but flexible material. Uh, spider silk has a potential place and spider evolution perfected it and we just were biomemetics are just catching up with it, you know. I have also read many stories over the years about using spider venom for medical purposes. One story in particular I remember was about using it to treat

erectile dysfunction. Is that correct? This is correct? Um? And And if anyone's like, oh, spider venom, I mean really, when you look at at medicines, the vast spectrum of medicines that we we we take from the natural world in a large part we're making use of poisons and venoms, you know, just figuring out what does this poison or venom do, and how can we interact with it at the appropriate dosage, of the appropriate level, How can we exploit those properties for our benefit. So in this case,

let's talk to a second about erectile dysfunction. Existing erectile dysfunction drugs manipulate valves controlling blood flow into the penis, but they don't always work. In fact, they don't work on one out of every three men who require any D drug. So we send in the spider. Specifically, we spend in the Brazilian wandering spider, also known as the banana spider. UH. They however, rarely crawl on bananas, which you know that will make sense to just a second here.

So these are five inch or thirteen centimeter arachnids. They carry a venom that can cause pain, swelling, increased heart rate, and also preappism, which is a condition that affects those blood flow valves that already talked about. UH, And this results in an erection that can last for more than four hours, is usually painful, and may happen without sexual arousal. So we're talking about blood potentially coagulating and clotting inside

of the erection. That's how dire situation is. So obviously that's nothing that one wants for oneself, but it's a great example. Here's the venom. We see that it's interacting with this area. Uh, that is that is vital for erectile drug creation. Like, there's a lot of money to be made in manipulating those valves, and so a lot

of research has already gotten into this. The researchers work to identify the natural derived chemicals in the venom that might be taken advantage up and so far they found that p n t X two six is the active compound in the wandering spider venom, and it's essentially a biological version of viagra. It even appears to have fewer side effects than existing E D drugs. Uh. However, to conduct a proper trial, you have they have to be

able to replicate the stuff in large enough quantities. And this is a situation we get into with both spider venom and with spider silk. Spiders are very difficult to farm. Yeah, I remember reading a story years ago about people who were weaving a garment out of spider silk. They were taking these uh or or weaving spiders at the Madagascar or somewhere uh and harvesting their silk in order to weave this dress. That that sounds like a crazy project

to me. I'm not sure if that's well advised, but anyway, I think they had to keep capturing and then releasing the spiders over and over uh in order to harvest their silk, because you can't just keep them, right. Yeah, it's not like a silk warrant worm, where where we have a silk producing uh insect that we have that we have domesticated and warped over time into just a you know, pure silk creating organism. But with spiders, most

of them are territorial carnivores. They're highly aggressive against anything, especially their own kind. There are social spiders that exist, and these are actually these are actually pretty interesting. I hadn't done a lot of reading about them before that. They're not quite use social in the manner of bees or ants, not team players, right, they don't have casts or anything. They're no work or spiders, etcetera. But they do cooperate in the rearing of young and the acquisition

of food. UH. That that being said, most of the spiders that people seem to be looking at to potentially farm are not social spiders. Uh So anyway, either way you look, you shake it. Though, way too much work would go into any attempt to raise spiders uh in little individual enclosures, and you would still get only a limited amount of spider venom or spider or spider silk

out of the the the effort. So it sounds like you'd want to find another way to produce this stuff, right, You want genetically modified spider silk or spider venom, And in fact, that's what's led to, for instance, the creation of the Blessed Goats spider hybrid, which we've covered on this show before. I believe where you let's make a let's let's tinker with the genetics, let's create a goat that essentially milks uh spider silk. That's the wonders of

our modern age. So that is where researchers have been looking with with the spider venom of our banana spider. In two thousand fourteen, researchers successfully created a recombin vaculo virus with the p n t X two six gene and then they use this to infect a culture of caterpillar cells, which produced the spider toxin. However, human trials are still years away. But this would be the shape of futuristic corrections, just just letting in shaped. Yeah, well

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

in analgesix. So there was a study I found in the British Journal of Pharmacology which indicated that quote spider venoms are a rich natural source of h in A V one point seven inhibitors that might be useful leads for the development of novel analg six. So the creation of new pain killers out of naturally existing proteins and stuff that are found in spider venoms. All right, So I guess the take home here is that spiders are high level produced. There. Their high level is the earns,

their high level weavers um. They have a mastery here in these crafts that humans are severely lack. All we can do is try and steal their secrets. And we're still trying to steal their secrets. So we certainly should not wipe them out because there's still so much to learn from them, of course, and that that's only the mercenary appeal to your self interest and in gaining new technologies. I want to say for the record again, spiders deserve to be here on this earth just like you do.

But okay, so back to the giant spider. I was eaten by a giant spider. Well, what does the word giant mean? There? I guess we should determine what we have in mind. Now. We could start by looking at what are the biggest spiders occurring in nature? I know some of you at home are already trembling and hearing about this news, but uh, there are a couple of ways you could measure this right. One way would be by mass. What is the heaviest spider ocurring in nature?

And I think the answer on that is is pretty solid. There there is a pretty much universal agreement that the answer is the theraphos of Blondie, commonly known as the goliath bird eater. That they might be a bit of a misnomer because it doesn't seem like they primarily prey on birds. I think this comes from some you know, nineteenth century illustrations and stuff like that. But uh, like I said, there's no evidence that they regularly eat birds,

but they might on occasion. The spider can weigh about six ounces or a hundred and seventy grams. That's heavy. That is the weight of more than three standard sized Snickers bars or exactly five fun sized Snickers bars. Hold five fun sized Snickers bars in your hand. That's how much the spider can weigh. I'm glad we're not eating those in our sleep. I've heard I've heard stories that you can hear these things walking. They'll walk you their

footfall balls makes sounds. Uh. Now, of course, they mostly prey on other arthropods, but they have been known to eat small vertebrate animals every now and then. But there's another way you could measure the largest spider, and that

would be by leg span. Right, what's the biggest what's the biggest spider in circumference sort of looking down from above, Well, it appears to be the giant huntsman spider with legspan of up to twelve inches or thirty centimeters, often described as being quote the size of a dinner plate that shows up a lot. Yeah, because you know, that's a wonderful image, the idea of setting down and here's a

living spider just spread out across your tinner plate. Well it also, yeah, it suggests that it's literally on the plate in your home. It's replaced your food somehow, or the chef has gone mad and decided it is live spiders for tenner um. Now, whe where do you find it? You find this particular specimen and warm climates around the world, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa. They're pretty fast even with their size. They live under a loose bark on trip our bark

of trees and rocks in crevices under foliage. And they're actually a rather social spider um, to go back to what I mentioned earlier, and dozens of them will sometimes sit together on dead trees or stumps, as opposed to the sort of typical predatory, loner vibe of a spider where it's like, if I see anybody that even looks like me, I'm gonna eat them, even if theyre might mate. Well, spiders just know not to pass up a good meal. Yeah, okay, So so that's about as big as things get in nature.

And even those are pretty rare exceptions. These are the biggest of the biggest. Obviously, that's not going to do it, right, These spiders don't really represent a threat to humans even though they're the biggest. So how big should our model

spider be to match the Roger Corman movie proportions? Well, then this we get back to some some previous discussions we've had about the morphological limits of giant creatures because you end up going up against two things, Right, what is technically pop stable from like a mad science this, you know, raising giant spiders in his basement, versus like, what is the largest thing that is sustainable? That the largest thing that is effective in the in the battle

for survival, because you know, it needs to work. It's like a business, right, if it's it needs to it needs to be an effect, have an effective economic flow to it, otherwise it's not going to survive. And you know, one way to look at it this we always we always go in this direction. When he's saying, all right, how called large, told this animal be well, how large are they now? We've already answered that how large have

they been in the past. There was a time where we thought that the largest spider to ever live was a prehistoric um Um mega acne with a body length of three nine millimeters or a little over a foot. But paleontologist eventually figured out that this was a sea scorpion, not a spider. And if you the actual fossil spiders that we have are pretty disappointing. They're pretty small. So we kind of get into the you know, whale territory here where we say, well, actually the largest specimens that

we know of are what we have today. Yeah, I I mean we've talked about this before. We talked about this in our Science of Human Height episode. We had a brief digression on on how large insects and spiders

and stuff like that can get. There seemed to be a lot of limits on on the size of these creatures, on arthropods with exoskeletons, that their their bodies are just not designed to keep getting much bigger like nobodies are really and it comes that we often talk about King Kong, right like King Kong the Guerrilla as just a giant gorilla, his legs would snap because those of a die of heat exhaust. Yet, yeah, like that form is not is not designed or you know, or did not evolve to

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

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

if you have a sufficiently large invertebrate. Then okay, it has this this this giant exoskeleton, and it's hard and it's rough, but somehow it's able to live with this thing. Maybe maybe it's an immobile giant spider and like villagers worship it and bring it, you know, virgins, a drain or something. Okay, that's great, But then what happens when

that giant god spider has to mold. Well, then conceivably it might have mold out of its exo skeleton and then its body would just collapse and fall apart because it didn't have They no longer had an exo skeleton supported it's mass. It's just too excessive. Yeah, I mean, it's like trying to imagine, um, I don't know. Uh, I'm coming up with a horrible exain. Here's here's what I tried to think of, like a you know, uh, twenty ft wide pumpkin or cantalope or something. It's just

this is not a sustainable size. I always come back to economics. It's like thinking of, all right, what would it be I have a great lemonade stand? What have I had a lemonade stand that could feed the entire country. What if I had a McDonald's restaurant that could that could actually feed an entire continent, or in feed they'll feed the world. Those are just ridiculous ideas because the form can't get people in the door. Yeah, it just

does not does not work. You're you're talking, You're talking nonsense. And it's a more thing like a lemonade stand that feeds, that gives lemonade to an entire country, is like a spider the size of a building. Right, Okay, so we've established why in an environment with our atmospheric pressure and Earth gravity and all that kind of stuff, you would

never see a giant spider. It just wouldn't happen. Now, in a weightless environment, genetically modified the giant spiders, I think there's a lot of potentially Okay, maybe that's not bad. But but let's just roll with it. Okay, we're we're going to Roger Corman Land. Just pretend we can ignore all that stuff and say we do have a spider. I don't know the size of a van or how big would a spider have to be to prey on a human? Uh, depending on you know, it's it's predatory

strengths on its venom and stuff like that. It probably wouldn't even have to be the size of a van, right, Yeah, I was thinking about this and it and also I kept running through my mind me and my son watching a blackwood a spider on a vacation Arizona, watch it try and catch a grasshopper in its web, and thinking

about those the size comparisons there. I think a large spider, like a hunting spider the size of a dog would be pretty pretty impressive, but not maybe not so large that you would really run into a lot of just real severe morphological limits. Okay, kind of like the dog costumes you see where the round Halloween where the dog is wearing a spider costume. Maybe not a puppy size spider,

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

so that's our lower limit. Let's say, on the other hand, we can keep in mind the possibility of of a you know, moving ock sized spider or a van sized spider that we'll we'll just have those floating in our mind. Okay, we won't ask a lot of questions of them, but we'll just have them there. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and when we come back we will discuss how they get you. All right, we're back now, Robert. We have to talk about how these spiders catch you.

Oh yeah, well, there there are so many different species of spiders. There's so many different hunting strategies that are utilized by spiders. The most familiar is going to be the web. But even with the web, there are multiple types, so you have just to roll through them real quick. You have orb webs, the most common typical spider web. You have triangular webs as well. You have funnel spiders and then make sheets of silk and then wrap them

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

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

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

in general. A dirty restroom is a great place to find a giant broom stall what is the perfect place to get you? Yeah? Um, I love that as the tagline for the resulting movie. Here sheet web spiders. They make many kinds of webs that are formed out of sheets of silk, and the sheets are widely wildly jumbled together and they don't have many large gaps. There's also an interesting sheet web spider type bowl and doily spiders.

They make really interesting structures, essentially an inverted dome shaped web or bowl suspended over a horizontal sheet web or doily spiders hang on the underside of the dome and they attack the prey. So we're talking about with some rather impressive structures. Now here's what I'm wondering if we scaled that up, and again, with all of the reasons that would probably never happen in nature, But if we just imagine scaling it up, would we would we actually

stumble into webs? I mean, are the success of webs sort of depending on the lack of sensation of insects or something? Do you do you kind of have to be a little bit dumber than the standard primate in order to end up in a spiderweb. Well, I think it's interesting to think in terms of the funnel spiders that already mentioned in that part of this trick is creating an alien environment that the spider has maximum control over.

So it's how you know, you might be dumb to wander in there, but you're not dumb to not know your way around this alien Environment's like walking into a zenomorph five right, or into you know, a derelict alien spaceship and not knowing which way we're to walk and what to do. Um that whatever lives there and eats there is going to have the advantage. Well, the kill

room analogy you had is a good one. It's also like at the end of Silence of the Lambs when when Joe Foster goes into Buffalo Bill's house exactly exactly like that and then even more complixate the drop on her. Yeah, he's got the drop, but imagine if he also had a decoy involved as well. What because there there are these spiders known as sly closest spiders and they create a double of themselves. They they they essentially craft a large spider from leaves, debris, and dead insect parts. Have

it in the web. Yeah, in this way, you know, confuses predators specifically, So if the spider is disturbed, it vibrates its body but once so it's primarily defensive technique against things that want to eat the spider. But I guess that would also be true if you had random Jodie Foster's random Clarice starlings wandering into your kill room and trying to apprehend you. Well, yes, I mean, Buffalo

Bill does have to defend himself against Jodie Foster. She was there to catch him, and she has a gun. But of course the trap stone in there. Do they Oh no, no, they get rather complicated, especially when you start looking at trap door spiders. Can you imagine this on the human scale to scale? Ups wandering along some dry ground and suddenly the ground under you shifts. What's happening?

I know? Yeah, this is perfect, this is um I guess to put this in horror movie terms as well, this would be like a a Saw movie kind of thing. I can't think of anything else recent where anyone's actually busting out a trap door. Uh you know, it used to be the standard Bond villain thing. But yeah. Trap door spiders prey on larger terrestrial anthropods and even occasionally on small lizards. They build tube like tunnels in the sides of banks, in disturbed areas, along natural insect walkways.

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

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

with it. Some of them make I don't know what would you even call it, more like a weapon with it. So how how about the Bullos spider. Oh yeah, they hunt by using a sticky capture blob of silk at the end of a line, which scientists called bulas. And if you see video of this, they actually spin it around like a lasso, like it'll be hanging from a web, spinning this line of silk around in the air and then snagging them off with it. So, yeah, that's a

great example. It's using it like a like a grappling hook or like like scorpions, Harpoon and Mortal Kombat. Right, Oh, that's good. And then on top of that, you have net casting spiders as well. When the prey approaches, the spider will stretch the net two or three times it's relaxed size, and then propel itself onto the prey, entangling it with the web. So these would be like the kind of like the gladiators with the trident. I guess uh in uh in gladiatorial combat. Oh, would they have

like the net like the fisherman styleators? Right? They got a net in a pokeia and in some sometimes there are some spiders of this type that have an extra technique that they used to help them pick out their prey. At night. This is pretty ingenious. So you have a particular species of the spiders that, in addition to any kind of structure they may have built, they'll also uh spray feces on the ground which will dry white, and then any dark animal that has to run across it,

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

be like scaled up to monster movie size spiders. I don't know if it really translates, right, I Mean, it's yet another one of those things where sometimes it's hard to fit this to our to our weird premise. A lot of this stuff seems to work on the small scale. Uh Like, I don't know would would would would spring the ground with fcs work for for a giant one of these things? I mean, I guess we just have

to stay in the light, right I guess? And you know, would a large spider to prey on humans have to get even more inventive. Would it actually use its webbing and it's decoys to create like an entire, entirely functional um rest stop to create a party with free beer. It's like, sorry, it's all spider silk. You don't know. Do you go to drink it? Yeah? So there are lots of methods of spider predation that obviously involves silk in one way or another, creating traps and stuff like that.

But there's also the much older, simpler, more universal hunting tactic where they just chase you down, Just run you down, bite, bite, and subdue. Yeah, maybe jump out from behind a tree or something. But so I was wondering about the speed of spiders. Try to imagine we've got the scaled up spider again, ignoring all the physics constraints, how fast would it move if it moved relative to its speed on the ground. The answer is hilarious. So, so I wanna

reference that. There's some papers on spider gate characteristics and and running speed among spider species that are like these grass funnel web spiders. Hololena is the genus, and research has shown that under experimental conditions, a couple of species of funnel web spinning spiders and the whole landa genus can perform sprints occasionally faster than about fifty centimeters per second, which works out to about seventy body lengths per second

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

seventy body lengths per second. If our giant spider has I don't know, a ten meter body length and can sprint seventy body lengths per second, that's seven d I mean that obviously that's not going to happen in reality, but these things would be able to chase you down in ways that are unbelievable to the human mind. Oh wow, Yeah, it's it's hard to even imagine how that would scale up.

The best I can do is to try and imagine it taking place in like a tensent dragons tiled map the grid and even then that's a ridiculous amount of speed. Why would you have that many grid squares battlefield that big? It's unmanageable. Contact your d m okay, So other fun adventures in predation. There is one family of spiders that I love, known as the labor a day the Allobrids. Oh yeah, these guys are great because they they actually

crush you. And I say you, I'm speaking of course to small insects, but they crushed their prey with their webbing. They wrap them up and essentially a body crushing iron maiden of silk. Yeah, there's a species particularly we've read about, the philip Pinella of Assinna And yeah, they have this method of wrapping you in silk that is so tight that your body structures are crushed. In word, they say that the legs snap that like the eyes buckle in.

It's it's pretty ground it. It reminds me of I think there's a scene in color Clowns from Outer Space where they utilize some sort of silly string contraption that works like this. But but yeah, the researchers have apparently observed these spiders spending a hundred times as much effort over an hour to wrap a prey in eighty meters of silk. So that's two d and sixty two feet, which seems crazy. Yeah, that that's not scaled to what

we're talking about. That's just like the tiny spider. Yeah, producing that much silk to to wrap the prey this type. And actually I've got some more interesting stuff about how the species eats in a bit. But so one reason they need to do this is because these are actually not venom producing spiders, that's right. They don't have the powerful bite. So what do they gotta do? What do they how do they start softening up their prey to consume.

They have to drool all over it. But you have a strate jacket, tighten it as much as possible, and then begin the vomiting. That seems to be the predominant theory is that they basically they know they're gonna have to drool over this stuff, so they want as small a target as possible. It's just go ahead and crunch it all up, make something small, so I'm conserving my spider drool. Okay, well, let's get more into the details

of how they drool on you. And uh, that's maybe even the nice way of putting it of what would happen to you as the eating process actually begins. Now, first, I guess we start with you being immobilized. You've been caught in a trap by a trapdoor spider, in a web, in a in a silk lasso, or you've just been chased down and bitten. Uh. One of the things that's gonna happen with pretty much all spiders except the labor day and another genus known as or not genus another family.

I think the the hul archad today is that they're all gonna have venom. And the venom glands are attached to ducts that travel down the length of the collissarae, and those are the mouth part structures right like the fangs. You are attached to the end of the collissarae. And then the ducts come down to a hole at the tip of the collissarol fang, and they'll hit you with that and rapidly contract their muscles to eject this cocktail

of venom into you. Now, the venoms vary from species to species, and the venom cocktail is generally well, it's a cocktail, it's heterogeneous. Right, So it means they contain multiple different toxins and different chemicals doing different jobs. So a common spider toxin is going to be a neurotoxic polypeptide. It's a chain of amino acids that attacks the nervous system. Uh, and the prey can expect to experience some distressing systemic

effects and paralysis. But different spiders are gonna gonna hit you with different venoms. There, They're gonna be different things. You'd have to expect. We can't. There's no one size fits all. But from this stage it's generally going to be on to the eating. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we will be consumed. Alright, we're back. The spiders have captured us,

and now they're going to consume us. Right, So the spider has you immobilized, perhaps wrapped in a cocoon of silk, may be subdued with a venomous bite, and the purpose of the venom is to subdue and paralyze the prey. I've read that the fact that it often kills the prey is technically an unnecessary side effect. Plus, we should keep in mind that venom is designed to work primarily against the spiders major food source, which is arthropods other

invertebrate insects. So you are not an arthropod unless you are, in which case we're preparing Earth for your arrival. But when the spider starts to eat you, you a mammal, I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe you'd still be alive and paralyzed, you might be dead. It's hard to say. It kind of comes down to did this thing evolved to prey on humans? How? Atomic radiation? Robert? Yeah, but that's the thing, Like it's a it's a tool

for a particular particular purpose. And unless you're dealing with some other worldly environment where humans and giant spiders have co evolved for this relationship, it's gonna be a little uncertain. It's to be a little off exactly right. So how does it start to eat you? Well, generally spiders consume a liquid diet. But I'm not a liquid, Robert, or you a liquid I'm mostly liquid. But you know, I mean if I were to go and eat you, you

would not you. I mean, your body has lots of liquids in it, incorporated into cell structures, you can have a lot of valid stuff. Yeah, So so something's going to have to happen here. So what's going to happen is that the spider begins to vomit on you. This can happen in a couple of different ways, which we'll get to in a moment. But the essential processes that the spider ejects digestive fluids onto you, and these digestive

fluids contain enzymes. Uh, the fluids are truly caustic. And here's one example to illustrate, which I thought was fascinating from a study in the Journal of a Racknology. So we're gonna go back to the lubri day. The spiders that don't have their own venom glans, right, and they crush you with that silk structure. So, uh, this is the same species we mentioned earlier, the Filipinella vicinna. They usually pose on their web in a strange posture if

you've ever seen this. They keep their legs folded in against the body. And it's been hypothesized that the reason they pose in the web like this is to avoid visually signaling predators. So there might be a bird that wants to eat spiders or something. It knows what a spider looks like. But if you don't pose in a way that gives away the fact that you're a spider, the burden might not recognize you as prey um. But when the elaborated begins to eat, it does something strange.

It gets out of its regular posture and spreads its anterior legs or the front legs wide apart. It holds them way back. Why does it do that? Well, the authors of the study point out that, you know, the spider's method of eating this illobred is to rapids prey in this ridiculously tight amount of silk, compress it into a compact package like a garbage compactor, and then just

vomit all over the entire thing. So most spiders are going to take a slightly different route where they eject these digestive enzymes through a small hole in the shell of the prey insect or over a small surface at a time when they're eating not pivicina. This will just slather the entire thing. Essentially, it's making a huge mess.

So the researchers asks, huh, I wonder if the spider it's is holding its anterior legs away from this mess, because the same digestive enzymes it's using to dissolve its prey would also dissolve its own body, and their research

found bingo, that does appear to be what's happening. The authors found that the spider's digestive enzymes, when applied to detached legs from the same spiders species, uh, they caused the set a, meaning the bristles, to fall off of the legs, and they also cause damage to the intersegment mental membranes between the different parts of the legs. So imagine if you had to eat by so you've got a plate you're sitting down with, you've got a hamburger on it, and you have to eat by vomiting Hollywood

acid all over your food. Yeah uh. And then also that stuff would give you chemical burns if you touched it with your own hands, so you sort of have to like vomit all over and then hold your arms back and slurp it up. But anyway, let's get back to being the prey. You're not the spider in this scenario. You're the prey, so obviously you've been immobilized. The spider

starts to apply this digestive fluid to you. Now, obviously, if you've been attacked by a giant uh P vicinna, you're gonna be crushed into a tiny ball with a tight wrapping of silk, so we can basically say it's lights out. Then the spider will dissolve your entire body with these enzymes and suck up your liquefying body parts, holding its legs back in a very dainty fashion as

it does so. Um, but well, what's gonna happen if it's not this species, if we're dealing with other types of spiders, And here a lot of my information is going to come from a really delightful arachnology book called The Biology of Spiders by rain or Felix. Uh So, for most types of spiders, feeding differs significantly based on whether or not the spider has what's called calyssral teeth. So the spider have the calyscera, you know, these are the mouth parts that have the fangs at the end

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

that liquid back in and then repeat at victori um. Uh. So what happens when the spiders don't have these teeth I mentioned the calyssol teeth or have a few of them. Uh. There are a few families of spiders that are like this. So there's the terridda day, the comb footed spiders or tangle web spiders, and this is a big family of spiders that includes the Latrodectus genus, which are the widows. And then also we're gonna include the thomisids with your

crab spiders. So these guys work typically by creating a very tiny hole in the outer shell of the prey, which they might poke with the calyscera, and then spitting digestive fluid into the body cavity through the holes. That makes sense. So you've got an insect with an outer exoskeleton and you're gonna be stabbing a hole in the outside and then just putting some of this digestive enzyme

inside through the hole. The process is continued until the prey is sort of left as a dry empty shell like the digestive enzymes in and then it sucks some fluid out. It's kind of reminiscent of some some mummification techniques have been employed. Really, you're gonna do about all that nasty stuff inside the creature? Well, you can try and drain it out, you can try and putrefy it

or what have you. And this is kind of like that. Okay, yeah, Well you are essentially left with a dried up husk of a creature which is mummy like and it's and it's outer appearance at least, so in the end, most of these interior tissues are going to be dissolved, sucked out, and delicious. And to me, I I wonder if so, I was left to wonder what a spider that works this way would make of an animal with an indoskeleton

rather than an exo skeleton. So does the exo skeleton work as an important type of container for the process, if that makes any sense. Would a spider like this trying to eat a mammal without an exo skeleton be kind of like if we tried to eat a bowl of soup without the bowl. Yeah, because it's essentially making you into a soup inside your own axis skeleton. Right, So I er, I don't know. Mammals might not be all that that enticing to spiders like this, but then again,

I don't know. It could be they may find some way around it. I mean they they have by and large evolved to prey and eat up eat invertebrates, and that's their realm of of influence. Yes, and also we're gonna get to the toothy spiders in a second, but first I want to hit a myth, Robert. I don't know if you thought like this when you were a kid.

I definitely thought this when I was a kid, and I know some people probably do think this, that spiders suck the juices out of prey animals through their fangs. Did you think this way? Um? I think I did. I don't know how much of that was, like directly due to science text in school or my or if it had to do with something I picked up elsewhere

and cartoons or something. But vampires, I often think of vampires this way, or I used to that they would bite you with their fangs, and then it would be sucking, not with like the mouth, through the esophagus in the stomach, but the blood that they drained from me would be going up through the fangs somehow into a blood receiving system. Anyway, I think a lot of people think about spiders this way.

This is not the case. That the presence of venom injecting fangs similar to hypodermic needles in a way, I think, could be responsible for the mistaken assumption that the fangs work both ways. But this is not true. That the fluid, so the fangs inject the venom, but the fluids that are coming out of the prey animal are coming in

through the mouth parts. The fangs are injectors. The spiders do consume with a fluid sucking action, but this is done through a mouth orifice powered by an order by the by the pharynx, and by an organ known as the sucking stomach. Like that's great, It's like a pump that that gets you know, it creates this suction action that pulls all that delicious fluid up through the mouth parts and through the pharynx down into the digestive system.

But anyway, back to the spiders that do have the teeth, So these are the ones that have these grinding surfaces on their calycera. They perform instead a kind of rudimentary grinding action with these surfaces. So in science we refer to this as a mastication. It's a great word, but it just means chewing. Uh. And so these spiders also do the same thing. Essentially, they work by regurgitating digestive fluids onto the prey that dissolves the prey tissues and

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

a chew chewed up mash. This is really grows it chewed up mashed up ball of food known sometimes as a bullus, that you then swallow. Yeah. Next, I'm highly encourage anyone next time you're eating, because I think about this all the time from an episode we did a few years back on digestion. But you can, actually, if you're conscious of it, you'll find yourself sitting there chewing and just feeling as your your mouth automatically liquefies um, choose up and then forms all of this into a

slurry bolus that then goes down the throat. That's yeah, great, But but what's it like to be that bolus? That's that's what we're wondering today. I guess at this point you're probably not aware of what's going on anymore, because the mastication process um and the dissolving of the digestive enzymes work together to sort of reduce you to an

unrecognizable ball of gunk. Uh So, you become this mush, and then they consume you via the old in and out that we discussed before in the end, leaving behind only sort of indigestible parts like shells or maybe in some rare cases, bones and feathers. Uh So, these spiders also have a process for vomiting backup hard in edible body parts that are accidentally slurped up along with nutritious dissolved meat from the prey, not unlike an owl. Owls

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

sort of filter them and catch them. Stuff that's not good to eat gets sort of bawled up and then ejected back out. Interesting, delicious, But of course this brings us back to the question though, what about vertebrates? Yeah, we are vertebrates. Can we look to examples of spiders preying on other vertebrates? If there were a giant spider, would it even want to eat us? I mean, would it just be looking for like, where are the you know,

equally sized insects for me to eat? Obviously, the primary prey animals of most spiders are going to be other arthropod invertebrates, mainly insects, But what happens when the food chain runs backwards? Do spiders ever seemed to eat vertebrates on purpose, even mammals. Yeah, yeah, this does happen. It doesn't happen that often, but it does happen. One example I want to look at is a paper by paper in Plos one by Martin Knifefeller and Miriam Nornschild, and

this was called Bat Predation by Spiders. It's about what you guess it is from the title. They tried to catalog recorded instances of spider predation on bats. Sometimes a bat meets an unfortunate and it gets stuck, entangled in a spider web. Sometimes after that happens, the spider begins to eat. So the author has judged that in many of the recorded instances, it looked like what had happened when a bat died in a spiderweb was what they

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

to attack, kill, and then eat the captured bat. They also point out that these cases of bat predation, where it at least seemed to them that the spider was genuinely preying on the bat, might inform our judgment of a hypothesis, and this is not necessarily known, but it's

a hypothesis in arachnology, the large rare prey hypothesis. And essentially what this suggests is that while most of the prey animals that are captured by large orb weaving spiders are going to be tied little insects of low nutritional value quote, the occasional catch of large, energetically rewarding prey may be essential in order to fulfill the reproductive needs of large orb weaving spiders. So, according to this hypothesis, if it's correct, you've got these spiders that most of

what they catch is just junk, it's insect garbage. Every now and then they hit the jackpot. And when they hit the jackpot with a really large insect like a cicada or something, or perhaps even a mammal like a bat or a frog or some other small vertebrate. They get this huge nutritional windfall that allows them to have a much greater chance of reproductive success. Is that kind of like a criminal of this pulling off a lot of petty little jobs, but still has to carry off

one big heist every so often to sustain things. It's like the beginning of the sting, you know, the grifters or knocking people over for a few bucks here and there by stealing their wallets, until they accidentally steal the wallet of a guy who's running money for an illegal casino, and they got these thousands of dollars. But of course in that scenario, the gangster then comes after them. I don't know if there's but this underlies the problem of

going after larger prey. Do you see through throughout the animal kingdom? And that's that, Yeah, the larger prey come with greater risk. You gotta extend more, extend more energy, possibly risk injuring yourself or even dying at the hands of the larger prey that you're going after. It's a it's a risk, but that's that's what that's. Great rewards come with greater risk, so they do. Yeah, I was eaten by a giant spider. Okay, so that's what it's

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

could look at some some old nineteen fifties Spider Ma trailers. Yeah, let's check in on our Facebook page and see if that's happening. Maybe we can make that happen the Friday after this airs. I just wanted to clarify I was kidding about the spiders coming by the way, I meant coming from space. I didn't want to suggest that I think that we're there evolving in that direction. And some people do listen to this show as they're falling asleep, so I would hate for that thought to enter into

their vulnerable, uh semi dreaming mind and plant any seeds. Yeah, we're not here to plant spider seeds in your head. That's for the twenty seven spiders that crawl into your mouth each night. Yeah, let me retreat and become responsible for a moment in my final in my final moments here, I want to remind you yet in spiders or your friend, they're not your enemy, No reason to fight them. At number two, there's never gonna be a giant spider on Earth.

All right. Well, hey, if you want to learn more about this topic or other related topics, heading over to stuff to Build your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where we will find all the episodes. You'll find some videos, which is our recent Monster Science U series that came out for Halloween this year, and we're continuing to celebrate Halloween pretty much throughout you had the rest of the year, so you can keep enjoying that ride

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