How do you keep spiders away

Opening the gate of my house, I mentally prepare for the test.

First things first, I need to get something from the shed - and there reign monstrous spiders the size of a mouse, sticking out from all corners awkward furry paws.

Then I move the paving slabs that had once been stored in reserve, trying not to hit the fussy, scorpion-like spider relatives that have made a lair there and eat wood lice in my absence.

I lay overgrown shoots of a jasmine bush on top of the fence, making sure not to collect long-legged pigtails moving along the fence. nine0011

I finally reach the patio, and there I am in for a shock. On the floor of the patio, his paws spread out as if he had fallen from a height and shattered, lies a lifeless Stripe.

This talented designer spent three years building an intricate 2D web between two trash cans. I composed a name for him and, imagine, managed to fall in love with him.

Falling down from his aerial throne, he looks not like an alien monster whose sight makes the blood run cold, but like any living creature whose heart has suddenly stopped beating. nine0011

Image copyright, Getty Images

This makes my heart skip a beat...

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But not all spiders end their days peacefully. Whenever we hear their tiny paws on the living room floor, or out of the corner of our eye see a movement in the corner as a spider descends its cobweb from the ceiling, it will be crushed, poisoned, sucked in by a vacuum cleaner, or, at best, thrown out of the house. nine0011

Why do so many of us, like powerful evil deities, almost reflexively kill spiders?

Of course people kill animals all the time. Neither agriculture nor laboratory experiments are possible without this unpleasant business.

But the destruction of spiders is often a pleasure and is perceived as a kind of victory.

"I had a spider in my bathroom, I sprayed it on it and watched it slowly die. It took about a minute. Really great new product!" - someone wrote with satisfaction in a review of spider killers on Amazon. "A mass of dead spiders lay on the floor or hung from bits of cobwebs," echoed another customer, who called it a "remarkable result." nine0011

Image copyright, Getty Images

Recent research disproves the notion of spiders as mindless robots - they are able to learn from experience and be flexible in solving problems that arise before them

A complex life form

A similar attitude to themes what is more shocking is that we and spiders have more in common than we think.

Our evolutionary paths diverged about 530 million years ago, but we have many similar organs - like knee joints - and a similar array of chemicals in the brain, from dopamine to adrenaline. nine0011

No one has yet tried to study the emotions of spiders, but it is easy to imagine that they are to a certain extent the same as ours.

Spiders have a large brain compared to body volume. Sometimes it does not even fit in the head and partially fits in the paws.

Spiders are capable of quite complex intellectual actions - for example, they use different tricks to lure and catch prey. There is growing evidence that they are not alien to a kind of thought process, and the web plays an important role in this process. nine0011

Finally, if a spider manages to avoid death at the hands of hysterical people, it can live for decades.

• Insects seeking warmth near us
• The world's largest spider barely fits on a plate
• Nine creatures that drink other people's blood

The oldest known specimen is a female mason spider (tarantula) named Number 16 - died in 2018 at the age of 43. All this time, she lived in the same mink in the North Bungulla Reserve in southwestern Australia. nine0011

Moreover, as biologist Lianda Mason, who studied her for many years, told the Washington Post, Number 16 died not of old age, but in the prime of her life, having become infected with the larva of a local parasitic wasp.

The life of spiders should be appreciated, if only because each of them, like any creature living on Earth, is the last link in an unbroken chain of successful ancestors that has been stretching since the emergence of life on our planet about 3.8 billion years ago.

Despite all the dangers, they managed to survive and continue their race. And so this endless human chain breaks when one of us casually crushes a spider with a sole in his bathroom, because ... because he annoys us! nine0011

Why are we so cruel? Or are there other reasons?

Image copyright, Getty Images

Spiders have features that are familiar to us, but at the same time they look like extraterrestrial creatures or alien biomechanisms

According to a professor of biology at the University of Wyoming and author of the book Infected Brain Why do people fear, hate and love insects? Jeffrey Lockwood, it is the unfortunate spiders that carry a whole set of features that seem repulsive to people - although they, unlike bedbugs, flies and wasps, are completely harmless. nine0011

An ancient enemy

Probably the most obvious reason is that it is organically difficult for people to feel sympathy for creatures with eight legs.

Children as young as five months are more afraid of spiders in pictures than of any other living creature. It is an innate aversion that makes us instinctively avoid handling creatures that might be poisonous.

It is multiplied by culture - suffice it to recall the largely irrational fear of sharks, which for some time took possession of mankind after the release of 1975 year of the movie "Jaws".

Parents tell their growing children all sorts of horror stories about spiders. In fairy tales and legends, they appear as monsters, like the terrible spider Shelob from the famous Tolkien trilogy. In many languages, the word "spider" metaphorically denotes an insidious villain.

An iconic British World War II poster depicted Hitler as a lanky spider spanning the globe with the caption: "One by one. We'll break his legs!" nine0011

Other arthropods, such as crayfish and crabs, do not arouse such instinctive revulsion.

Perhaps the matter is in the alien to everything earthly and familiar appearance of spiders with their twelve eyes, eight legs and jaws without teeth. Perhaps - in their behavior: spiders prepare traps for careless victims and slowly suck out the insides of prey unable to defend themselves, and also eat their own kind.

"Spiders are unusual and at the same time are constantly with us. It makes people feel disgusted," says Professor Lockwood. nine0011

Spiders are also genetically different from us. We have much less in common with them than with mammals and even reptiles.

Image copyright, Getty Images

Jumping spiders have huge eyes that give them superb vision - these spiders perceive colors and distances and see more details than other vertebrates

This is the main problem. The more we are united with others, the closer the relationship, the easier it is for us to feel sympathy for them.

A study conducted in 2019 established a direct relationship between human attitudes towards different living beings and the time that has passed since the moment when our evolutionary paths diverged.

Even specialists like to work with kindred and charismatic animals more. An analysis of scientific publications made in 2010 showed that for one paper on endangered amphibians, there are on average 500 papers on endangered large mammals. nine0011

All this taken together prevents us from caring for spiders. The same is true for marginalized human minorities.

Participants in one experiment were shown pictures of people in danger and felt much more empathy for those in the same group as themselves.

This effect has always been used by military propaganda - to awaken and form hatred for the enemy.

Loss of control

Many horror stories about spiders are based on surprise. Like, say, the one where a person puts on an old fancy dress for Halloween that has been lying in the attic for a long time, and his friend exclaims: “Wow, I love that spider around your neck! It looks so realistic” - but it turns out that the spider is real and everyone screams.

Geoffrey Lockwood says part of our distaste for spiders stems from our inability to control them: "We think we are the masters of the house, and insects, including spiders, without asking us, climb from under the floorboards and everywhere, and there is an unpleasant sensation that we're not in charge here." nine0011

Spiders are good at hiding and moving fast. It is impossible to isolate themselves from them with a fence, as from pigeons and foxes.

We are used to the fact that, thanks to the achievements of civilization, we are able to control everything, even regulate the temperature in the house from the other side of the Earth - and spiders suddenly appear in our beds and boots, like a thousand years ago.

Silent scream

In addition, spiders cannot express their emotions in a way that we can understand and make sounds, so when a spider is hurt, we don't care. nine0011

"Spiders are in an unfavorable niche for them," says Professor Lockwood. "If they didn't encounter us at all, there wouldn't be a problem. But we know them well and yet we don't perceive them at all."

Image copyright, Getty Images

Many people are afraid and disgusted by spiders, and this overpowers our ability to sympathize with all living things

As the ecologist wrote in his book "The Art of Being a Master: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development" Stefan Kellert, "it seems to us that these creatures are devoid of any mentality." nine0011

People mistakenly believe that insects, and all invertebrates in general, do not feel like we and more complex animals, and therefore we do not care if they live or not.

We crush the spider and immediately forget about it, unless he ran away. Annoyance from failure is the only feeling that arises.

However, the attitude towards large spiders is somewhat different. They are either not touched or considered as an object of hunting.

"We have spiders like this here," says Greg Neely, professor of functional genomics at the University of Sydney, showing a 15-centimeter specimen. ". nine0011

Professor Lockwood agrees with the observation of a colleague and says that his wife used to cover the cockroaches with empty yogurt cups, which sometimes lined up in a row, so that her husband, when he came home, threw them out into the street. "She didn't really like insects, but like some of my other acquaintances, she didn't crush large cockroaches because they die with a nasty bang," he says.

"It's easy for us to crush a living being if our senses do not receive a signal that a murder or an act of violence is taking place at that moment," he added. nine0011

Villainous Appearance

Apart from their menacing jaws and mincing legs, the appearance of spiders has, from a human point of view, a huge drawback: they do not look like human babies at all.

This powerful effect has long been known. We subconsciously like the features of a baby's face: big eyes, high forehead, small nose and chin, plump angelic lips. Numerous cases have been documented when in nature reserves, zoos and laboratories "pretty" animals received much more attention and care from people than "ugly" ones. nine0011

Image copyright, Getty Images

Digging spiders (tarantulas) spend most of their lives in burrows, picking up on the fine vibrations produced by approaching prey to jump out and grab them

Spiders with their tiny beady eyes, definitely , belong to the second category. At the same time, we mistakenly attribute all sorts of negative traits to creatures with an unsympathetic appearance: cruelty, perfidy, callousness.

It is curious that big-eyed spiders seem to be less disgusting and frightening to people. For example, jumping spiders, which have a pair of large eyes in front and a few more less noticeable ones at the back of the head. nine0011

One researcher in his work even called them "intermediary spiders" between the entire spider tribe and people. Video of them doing their mating dance to the sound of Y.M.C.A. American group Village People, has gained immense popularity in social networks.

Distorted Hierarchy

We usually look at spiders as a minor nuisance that should be eliminated. But there are many arguments in favor of treating them with care - and here simple psychological tricks can help. nine0011

One of them is to humanize spiders as much as possible and attribute our feelings to them: "Look how angry she is!" In this case, it is not at all necessary to know what gender the spider actually is.

Another is to remember the importance of conserving endangered species, which include many arachnids.

There is another opinion: since the natural human empathy for other beings is subconscious and nothing can be done about it, it should not be taken as a guide to action at all. nine0011

Rational considerations, such as the beneficial role of spiders in an ecosystem, should be motivated instead. According to various estimates, arachnids annually eat from 360 to 730 tons of prey, holding back the growth of the population of other insects, including those harmful to humans.

One can also think about how perfectly arranged spiders are capable of making rather complex decisions, although their brain size is tens of thousands of times smaller than that of large mammals.

"People believe that some forms of life are more valuable than others, often without thinking why," says Geraldine Wright, professor of entomology at the University of Oxford, noting that a pronounced aversion to spiders is part of Western cultural tradition, while, say, Buddhism professes the principle "All living things have the right to life. " nine0011

The idea of ​​preserving wildlife and biodiversity is gaining momentum around the world. Many experts hope that people will eventually become more tolerant of spiders.

"The idea that any creature is valuable in itself and cannot be destroyed just like that is gradually gaining a place in the sun," says Donald Broom, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Cambridge.

...While I was writing this article, I noticed that a new Stripe is being set up in the same place in my garden, maybe the son or grandson of the old one. And let it - regardless of whether I like it or not. nine0011

Spiders adjust their web to the prey they want to catch

23 March 2015 13:25 Margarita Paymakova

Dew on the cobweb
(photo by Luc Viatour/Lucnix. be/Wikimedia Commons). nine0011

An international team of researchers has found that orb-web spiders change the properties of their webs depending on which prey they most want to catch. The diet, in turn, also affects the "trapping network".

An international team of researchers from China, Taiwan, Australia and Denmark, led by Sean Blamire, have found that Nephilia pilipes orb weaving spiders are able to tune their web in a certain way to ensure that the most nutritious and most desirable mining. nine0011

Spiders usually spin webs of sticky silk threads. They help animals catch and hold prey (small insects). When an arthropod feels that someone has fallen into its trap, it rushes to the victim with lightning speed and kills it. The process seems simple enough, but scientists are discovering more and more unusual aspects of it.

In their lab, the researchers conducted several experiments involving orb-weaving spiders, crickets and flies (which are the most commonly preyed on by spiders). According to the researchers, crickets create strong vibrations in the web, because, entangled in them, they try to jump out. But when flies hit, the webs fluctuate less, mainly due to the buzzing and vibration of the insect's wings. Accordingly, each type of prey needs its own type of trap. nine0011

Researchers have also noticed that cricket bodies contain much more protein than flies, making them more desirable prey, but the flies are caught in nets more often, so they provide a more regular "food supply". In the course of past scientific work, scientists have already discovered that the structure of the web largely depends on the nutrition of the spider, but it has not been possible to track the relationship before.

By observing spiders in action, the researchers found that arthropods strengthen their web and make large cells in it if crickets are regularly caught in it. However, if crickets are away for a long time, they increase the overall size of the web and reduce the size of the cell, increasing the chances of catching more flies.

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