Step into my Parlour

No,spiders are not very cuddly,or have a vast fan following,do they? But they should. For,these same ghoulish attributes have made them amongst the most successful creatures on earth. They say five million inhabit a single hectare of undisturbed farmland in green,trim England. How many millions more,in our hot,torrid tropical environment,fetid and pulsing with life?

Spiders are not insects theyre arachnids. And have as their relatives,scorpions,whip scorpions,ticks,mites and king crabs. Nice. World wide there are some 30,000 species belonging to 60 families.

Theyre well-equipped. The spiky legs,more sensitive than seismographs,ready to pick up the faintest tremble of a palpitating insect. Six to eight eyes: the jumping spiders that hunt down their prey have wide-angle plus high resolution telephoto vision. Other spiders may be a bit myopic. Poison jaws to deliver the killing bite. The venom of some (like the black widow) can kill a man,after driving him crazy with pain. The roving spiders the hunters and jumpers dont even need their species ultimate weapon,the web,to be successful. They are ambush assassins.

By contrast,the sedentary spiders have more laid-back lifestyles. Every evening and early morning,they spin their architectural wonders after eating up the old,tattered webs of yesterday. Everything is recycled. Then they sit back and wait. Sensing the size and weight of a victim by the amount of vibration as it whams into the web and struggles,the spider decides whether to attack or bide its time. Then the poison injection is given,and the meal begins. Or else,the victim is swaddled head to toe in silk and stashed away for a future feast.

The silk itself is magic stuff,made of keratin. Squeezed out in liquid form (like toothpaste),it hardens on contact with the air and as it is stretched. Several varieties of silk can be produced depending on what it is to be used for. The more it is stretched,the stronger and more elastic it gets,surpassing steel and Kevlar; we want to make bulletproof jackets out of the stuff but its too expensive even for the Americans.

While constructing the web,the spider first uses non-sticky silk so that it doesnt get caught in its own trap and once the structure is complete,backtracks,eating this as it goes and unraveling sticky thread behind it. The radiating ribs are made of non-sticky thread to enable it to return to the centre and make its way to a victim.

Spiders use silk for other purposes too. Egg cases are spun out of silk,and jumping spiders belay lifelines of silk as they leap. Spiderlings point their bottoms skywards and unravel a thread in the hope of it catching a gust of breeze and sending them ballooning to new territories.

It is strange that most fair damsels fear spiders so much,considering that girl spiders can weigh a thousand times as much as their puny boyfriends,and many,being highly-strung and myopic,eat them first and ask questions afterwards. And now researchers are saying that male spiders deliberately make the supreme sacrifice: they mate,not once,but twice. After the first time,they do their best to get away alive. Then,fatally,they return for an encore. And what else can she do now but eat him,in everlasting memory,and so nourish herself and babies-to-be on his vital fluids?

Of course,in our usual unthinking way,we persecute spiders when we really shouldnt be doing so. They are cockroach killers par excellence,and keep down the population of mosquitoes and flies and plant pests.

And,of course,a hairy wolf spider scuttling out of the plughole and up your leg while youre naked and helpless in the bath can be a telling reminder of who really is the superior species!

Ranjit Lal is an author,environmentalist and bird watcher. In this column,he reflects on the eccentricities and absurdities of nature