Spiders
are one of the most feared and miss-understood creatures of the world, most of
it comes down to bad experience and bad stories that has had the truth warped. The
main image of spiders are little things that produces silk and give poisonous
bites, this is not all true! yes many do produce silk for building different types
of webs, some
don't even build webs but use a net made of silk but the most common use for
silk is cocooning the eggs. There are so far 40,000-45,000 know species of
spider and experts think that with the unknown it could be around 70,000 species
and out of these only a few have a bite that contains poison that affects
humans. Spiders are rated on the type of poison they produce; there are two
different kinds of poison "neurotic" and "cytotoxic". Spiders
like the Sydney funnel web and Black widow are in the neurotic section as their
venom attacks the central nervous system, the way it works is that the respiratory
system start to become paralysed and the signals from the brain that tell it to
"breathe" stop. With some spiders this is a slow and painful process. Cytotoxic
is when the tissue and muscles are dissolved away, this mostly occurs where the
bite and venom has been administered and some of the spiders in this section the
brown recluse spider and the woodlouse spider. The poisonous spiders of the
world would many years ago cause death because of no anti-venom but as our
technology has improved and research carried out we now have
anti-venoms and this stop nearly all bites being fatal with the exception of
remote places or people waiting too long. When you look deep into spiders as a
whole you start to see many things; they are very useful to humans as they eat
insects, they keep their numbers down in terms of house numbers and with
exceptions hide away. Spiders can live almost everywhere from places you think
impossible to places we might know well. They range from forests, deserts,
ships and even underwater.
Most spiders will spin a web, the best known family to most of us is the orb-weavers like the common garden spider and the strawberry spider. There are many types of webs and all have different uses for example: types of webs are lace-web; tube-web, tangle-web, sheet-webs and the orb-weavers, there are also many uses for silk other than to catch food. Trapdoor spiders live in burrows or underground and have "trip lines" and when an insect touches the trip line vibrations travel down the line and lets the spider know its location and then with precise aiming its darts from the tube and makes the kill then resets the trap. Silk is also used for the egg sac as they cover the eggs in silk and then some spider will use silk to seal them against walls or carry the eggs on their back. Lastly a drag ling this is used both for spiderlings (baby spiders) and adults, the spiderlings use it to fly away from the web and adult spiders use it when descending from there web so they can climb back up to the web.
The largest of all spiders is the Goliath tarantula of south America with an impressive leg span of 25 CM and the tiniest is the little fully grown is a male from a group called patu digua and its body length 0.37MM witch is smaller than a pin head. Apart from size spiders have so many cool things about them for example you have some that are so striking in colour that you need shades on and then you have the ones so well camouflaged that only movement gives them away, then you go into the subject of appearances: there are the normal looking ones like a garden spider but out in warmer regions there are spider like the spiny backed Orb-weaver and the horned Orb-weaver. Most of the stunning looking spiders belong to the orb family. A lot of people are unsure of the reason for the shapes, some say to make them look bigger, and some say its so other creatures trying to eat them can't because of the horns or spikes. There are also the spider that look like twigs or even a bird dropping and there are spiders that look like ants the only way to tell is by the 8 legs this helps them as there feed is normally ants. To help them avoid danger they blend in with the background e.g. green spiders live in trees and white spiders live on white flowers this helps them to eat but it stops the spider being eaten. Spiders don't score well in intelligence and sometimes spider that should blend in don't for example a pinkish coloured on a white daisy as can be seen in the gallery. There is also the jumping spider group and here in Britain they are small but when I was in the USA the jumping spiders were bigger and you can clearly see the 2 front pairs of eyes that are larger.
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