At one point in the move, she got left behind and I ended up with just the egg sack to move. You could feel the panic and protective instinct in her movements. I got her onto the leaf and reunited with her eggs on a nearby plant and she quickly went to work finding the right spot and securing her sack to the underside of one of its leaves.
I watched her there for a while in her new location, and there is absolutely more than just instinct at play.
I didn't grow up liking spiders much, but gardening in particular has given me a new perspective on them. One measure of our garden's health is the amount of spiders we see, keeping other would-be pests in check.
Trees will form a network with the cooperation of fungi, to exchange information and nutrients among each other. Plants will grow better when they are planted with companion plant, or cultivated in guilds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_(ecology)
A few years ago I've been out, seeing blackberry bushes in full bloom, ripe with berries,
many already dropped to the ground. One could even smell them from dozens of meters away.
That was on a former industrial/commercial zone in the harbour, everything torn down,
leveled up a few meters with massive earthworks, compacted, graded.
Since a few years, no activity. Barren and bare execpt for a few weeds and bushes,
some colorful wild flowers, thistles(also very colorful!) some small birches. "pioneer plants" AFAIK.
Anyways, hords/squadrons of all sorts of insects swarmed around those bushes,
really darkening the air and making a loud buzz/hum/drone.
But strangely no birds.
Whatever, I wanted some of those blackberries, too!
So I thought about what I intended to do in terms of movements, actions, and so on, all visually,
and thought about projecting that outwards in crystal clear HYPER-IMAX-3D-whatever, for every single step,
slowly stepping into the swarm, thinking the same way about every hand movement, exactly from where I'd pluck the next one,
thinking don't sting or bite me, stay away from my face, there is enough for all of us...
And none have stung or bitten me, also they left me alone, with the exception of a few landing on my bare arms,
and resting there for a few moments, before taking off again.
But it seemed mostly unnecessary, because most of them seemed to be in a holding pattern,
waiting for space on the ground, to gorge themselves there on the juices of the fallen berries.
So I only needed to watch my steps.
The berries were exceptionally good :-)
I took about 1,5 to 2kg back home in foldable plasic bags, which I always have in my backpack for shopping.
But before doing that, I took my time, squatting down, and watching the bees, wasps, bumblebees, flies, whatever, flying erratically,
like they were drunken from the juices of the fallen to the ground berries, away, maybe a hand width above the ground.
That was their pattern, coming in high, going out low, like drunken. Still no stings or bites! :-)
One of the weirdest experiences I've had.
I'm still doing that with my cats, which I got later. Not speaking,
but thinking visually about things I'd like them to stop, and why,
what can be dangerous when I'm working in the kitchen, or soldering electronics,
how I like the ways they move, and so on.
We mostly communicate in silence.
Typical "catness" stubbornly ignoring everything aside, it feels like it's working in about 80 to 90%.
No stress with "herding cats" here. (3 of them)
Maybe we lost this stuff, the ability to perceive things like that, or it has been selectively bred out of us,
by the environments we created, which in turn shape us.
Back to topic (somehow):
Long before I got my cats, I had a 'stray' calico coming to me for about a month, from who knows where.
One night, while she was resting on a four times folded sleeping bag I'd layed out for her on my bed, I heard her loudly meowing.
No clue about what was going on because out of sight. I went there, and she stood on her hind legs, looking afraid,
slowly walking backwards into the farthest corner on her hind legs, meowing miserably.
At first I didn't get what was going on, then I saw a small spider, brown white, whith pale green backbody,
not larger than a pea, whole spider maybe an inch at maximum with fully extended legs.
The cat was terrified of that spider! Even when I've put the spider into a glass and thrown it out onto the balcony.
When I came back she still warily sniffed the spot from where I put the spider into the glass, meowing annoyed.
Took some time to soothe her.
I've never seen, or heard of cats being afraid of spiders before, nor I can imagine how that should work,
since outdoor cats should have plenty experience meeting them in the wild?!
In the visionary shamanic community, we might call these intelligences animal, plant, or insect teachers.
Spiders have a special, very profound medicine. Many beings are afraid of them, and moving through that fear is part of the test to learn from the spider teacher. There is something similar with snakes. The venom is transformative.
I noticed too that you talk about pioneer plants and you seemed to have skill at foraging. I’ll make a bold assertion that’s out of place for this forum: I think that a civilization that are organized around local food resiliency and sovereignty using such things as permaculture design can free up the time for humans to really explore consciousness. It requires time and awareness and not better machines and technology.
Feel free to contact me by email if continue this conversation interests you. Talktohosh on gmail.
One could also conclude the opposite. What we perceive as concious thought or emotion is just instinct.
Still, the urge for care ones young, while not necessarily very - cerebral? - at least creates a feeling of familiarity and connection - ie. empathy. When this empathy comes across from an arthropod to a higher mammal it's still humbling and awe inspiring, even though it might tell more of our autonomous nature than the intellect of the arhtropod.
I wouldn’t say what I experienced was much more than instinct and making a new web, but the emotional response of a mother protecting its young was relatable across very different species, which is useful for building empathy and respect.
The examples in the article are much more interesting from an intelligence standpoint though.
Pretty sure this is what doctors said as their justification for not using anesthetic on babies during medical procedures.
"Oh, they're just crying and screaming because baby, duh"
We now look back at that as being quite a barbaric practice/way of thinking.
This comment reminded me of a great book I read called Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.
https://www.amazon.com/Mamas-Last-Hug-Animal-Emotions/dp/039...
A documentary about octopuses last moments in life, really shook me. It might be interpretation/anthropomorphism but anyway, apparently after laying eggs, the octo mom will breath out water (warmed by her body) around them. The process lasts a while and when she's exhausted she spends the remaining energy to swim as far as possible and die. The theory being she'd rather not attract predators with her corpse. A final step in sacrifice.
I too now try to redirect life forms to where they can live better. I used to seriously arachnophobic but nowadays I can manage grabbing a box or a long piece of paper to move insects around or outside if needs be.
I don’t want to spoil it but it’s quite a story.
And on topic, I hate small house insects. They bother the hell out of me. So, spiders I treat very well and while not welcoming them in, when discovered I'll find them a new home outside rather than kill them. But then, I don't live in Australia..
It was fascinating how the octopus seemed to have trust and opened up to him.
Disagreed with his reasoning when she was being attacked - if she’s a friend, help her. Sitting back and recording her getting hurt because he didn’t want to “interfere with the natural processes” didn’t make much sense.
Hopefully when you say "get rid of it," that means gently coaxing them into a box and putting them outside.
That's how predators act. Yet, we have no lack of love for birds and cats.
Anyway, don't group spiders on the "have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates". They are much more complex than that. Besides some vertebrates also have no problem doing that.
Just because you can't readily see the emotion, does not mean it is not there.
True to say that 'we don't know if they regret having to eat their young/mates', but saying they don't care is just as much making assumptions as saying they do regret it, merely switching the polarity.
It is also possible that eating the mate/being eaten is the most loving thing it can do, giving not only the DNA but also their entire stored energy for the good of the offspring. Or, they might be terrified. Or, they might not be sufficiently sentient to notice. Either way, what we know is that we don't know (tho there may be someone who's studied it enough, IDK).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571...
Given that neurotransmitters (adrenaline?) are so instrumental to regulating emotional state, that claim seems highly unlikely.
The most plausible possibility is that all multi-celled beings have some sense of family and parenthood.
And here with the spiders you are presented with evidence of such.
Does a mother spider feel distress with quite the same level of nuance as a mother human? Perhaps not. Is she clearly distressed? absolutely.
At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.
Seems like you glossed right over the most important part of their comment.
And the flipside of focus is blindness. Ignorance.
One thing is focused upon, seen and controlled with vast depth and clarity. While 1000 other things are obliviated away.
That obliviated part. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. (And a lot of good stuff too, no doubt)
Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.
Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No.
Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
oh my cat don't even eat the animals it brings back inside the house. Birds, baby rabbits (these ones survives for it can catch them but not kill them), lizards by the metric ton, spiders, mice...
It brings them back to me and let them in the living room.
Sometimes I get two animals a day.
I don't know: maybe the cat understood we do the cooking and somehow thinks we're going to cook all it brings back.
I remember an old blog where some coder who also had a relentless cat (I'd say at least 10 years ago) set up face a webcam and face recognition for its cat inside the pet door and wouldn't let the door open if the cat had something in its mouse.
I've got to find that blog post! Luckily my cats don't bring back half a dozen animals a day anymore but I'm still tired of chasing squirrels and mice around my house once a week.
Not every animal is like this. Most spider never kill animals they can't eat if they're not a threat to them. If one such creature falls into their web, they just release it.
>Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out
How else are they gonna eat? They don't have teeth with which to chew their food like we do.
>Cats play with their food.
Many cats can be sadistic selfish assholes, but somehow many humans love them to death because they're cute and fluffy.
Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter.
This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
Experiencing this horror, I decided there and then that I will not eat meat and fish again to satisfy my tastebuds. It has been years since I left eating meat and fish. But even now when I see non-vegetarian dishes(at home or other places) I have urge to eat non-veg. It is very difficult to leave eating non-veg; it is like addiction. But everytime I have that urge to eat non-veg, that scene from the meat shop plays in front of my eyes. It is very painful.
Another scene that I regularly see in my local area every morning is when cattles are transported in a truck to a near-by mass slaughter house. The trucks are enclosed from all sides with just a slit open for the cattles to look outside so that they do not panic in the metal enclosure. Looking at their eyes one can easily see that they are trying to understand where they are and what is happening. And everytime I see that I say to myself, these unsuspecting defenceless animals are going to face a gruesome death within an hour just to satisfy the appetite of some humans!
There is absolutely push/incentive to monitor and correct for failures in stunning. The stress response it entails in the animal makes for poor quality meat, or even inedible meat that would have to thrown out.
Also, stunning is followed by slaughtering and draining. There is no situation in industrial production in which an animal would be dismembered and skinned alive.
I would completely support requiring direct expert supervision of every single animal slaughtered. This is the norm at the smaller operations, but something like 80% of US cattle are slaughtered at giant Chinese owned factory stockyards.
We are clearly demons.
And all those grand pianos falling over the poor cat again and again...
Oh sorry, we were talking about the real life, or in terms of a cartoon possibility?
[Edit: I googled around, and this was an interesting article from Rod Crawford, the curator of arachnid collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Seattle talking about house spiders being traced back to Roman times. https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology... ]
This has actually eliminated much of my arachnophobia, since I find myself studying the spider, safely confined inside the glass before letting it out. (This is actually one way they treat phobias clinically, a kind of desensitization exercise)
Anyway, one day, I was hiking with friends, and someone pointed out I had a bug on me. I picked it up and realized it was a spider -- and then it dawned on me that I wasn't afraid of it at all. It was one of the most thrilling moments of my life to hold a spider without any fear at all. I started seeking out spiders to handle them. Even after I stopped taking that medication, the effects lasted. Nowadays I love spiders.
I learned years after stopping taking it that this medication has been studied both for PTSD and phobias -- specifically arachnophobia.
Your comment made me think to tell this story because I pretty much always attempted to bring spiders outside rather than kill them despite my fear. My rational side knew that most spiders are harmless, sensitive, and highly beneficial creatures. Plus I always hated killing anything and still do. But the exposure didn't actually reduce my fear of them noticably. And that experience is borne out in the research -- exposure therapy doesn't seem to be enough for most people
Apparently propranolol is effective because it works on memory consolidation -- more or less it helps with overwriting old negative memories (more specifically the emotional charge that accompanies the memory) with newer positive ones.
https://youtu.be/uO8pXtvxAA0?t=1893
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/a-drug-to-...
It’s more the erratic, jittery movements of spiders and their multitude of fast legs that’s off-putting.
Especially when you’re taking a dump in a dimly-lit outdoor toilet and notice there’s a hand-sized huntsman spider a few inches from your knees. I have never sprinted so fast.
https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(97)70944-X/pdf
So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
My understanding is that most people never see a brown recluse, even within their natural range. Those who do see them probably don't recognize them most of the time, because they're not especially big, because from a distance they look pretty much like any other brownish spider, and beause neither the human nor the spider generally want to get close enough to make a positive identification possible.
But it so happens that I've seen a lot of them, so I offer some trivia about that.
I saw hundreds when I was 12 and my father and brother and I were hired by a neighbor to tear down a shack on his property. It so happened that there were hundreds of recluses in the shack. I know because I was nerdy twelve-year-old with a fascination with wildlife and field guides, and I had a pretty nice little field guide with a good image and description of brown recluses.
I've seen many more of them in the house I live in now. I've been in this house for about fifteen years now. There are a lot of brown recluses living in it. I've seen many dozens of them over the years. The last time my daughter came to visit us, she found four or five of them during the week she was here. She's a little arachnophobic, but not too badly, and the experience hasn't diminished her enthusiasm for visiting We expect her to be back in a few months.
According to Wikipedia and other sources I've read, they rarely bite--generally only when they're being mashed against someone's skin hard enough to frighten them but not hard enough to kill them. When they do bite, it rarely causes any symptoms. When it produces symptoms, they're usually minor--most often sores on the skin; less often some necrosis of the skin.
The bite _can_ cause much more serious symptoms, but that's rare.
I had a bite once living here that might have been from a brown recluse. My doctor was skeptical, because the bite didn't look quite right. It produced a small, tender sore and a really large inflamed area around it. I didn't notice it at all until a relative noticed it on my back. That's consistent with reports of brown recluse bites: most often people don't feel the bite when it happens. Their fangs are quite small--usually they aren't able to pierce fabric--and the venom itself is painless; it's the later effects--if any--that become painful.
At any rate, I and my relatives seem to have reconciled ourselves to living with a large infestation of brown recluses.
With that I can easily pick them up and drop them out the window or whatever. You can do it at well over arms' length too. It doesn't seem to harm them, as there's a space within the grabbing cage that they get directed to. Small spiders can crawl out between the cage bits but usually stay on the end long enough to move them elsewhere. Big spiders are fully caught.
> "It's fast, easy and eco-friendly!"
It's a piece of plastic that will be shipped halfway around the world, to do what could just as well be done by a glass and a bit of cardboard.
It might be fast, easy and particularly convenient, but "eco-friendly" it most certainly ain't.
Wait until the spider is stationary. Put the glass on its side with the mouth directly in front of the spider. Then - tickle the spider's behind. Invariably the spider will panic-run forward, right into the glass. Lift the glass and there you have it! Spiders can't climb the smooth sides so no lid necessary.
I have found that persuading the spider to enter the glass without tickling its behind to be much more challenging for some reason. They sense the trap, or at least that it's a sterile dead end. But startle them, and they'll always run forward in a straight line.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Carson-Quick-Release-Catching-Magnifi...
Unfortunately, my wife is phobia level scared of spiders. So now if they bother her, by extension that is bothering me, and so I take measures to make sure they don't bother her.
But I motorbike commute every day with webs around my dash/handlebars. I wish my little spider bro good luck every ride.
You see it in plants. Trees preferentially share of resources with their offspring.
Thanks for sharing an amazing story. I'm not surprised to see motherly love in spiders.
https://www.wsl.ch/en/2020/02/trees-pass-on-environmental-me...
I've killed a few, but I think I won't any more. Not necessarily because of this article, I just hate killing things.
I never knew of them before this fall until a friend of mine went on "removal" spree at his place, and now I've seen a lot more of them in my own yard.
One issue is we also have migrating hummingbirds, and the webs are big enough to foul them up. The spiders won't eat them of course, but I also can't have our hummingbirds dying over getting caught so I'll be knocking down webs in their area if I have to.
This particular spider kept running back and forth between my monitor and a window, and when it'd get to my monitor, it would wave its front legs at me. If I moved to the left, it would run across to the left side of the monitor and waves it legs again. If I stood up and moved closer to it, it would run back to the window, turn around, and waves its legs at me. From watching YouTube too much, I was always under the impression that this was either a sign of aggression or a defensive stance.
But after a few times of going back and forth like this, I realized there were approximately 50 baby spiders around a light by the window, which had been closed since the previous day. Normally this would be a nightmare for me (I've always had a fear of spiders), but after a while, I had this crazy notion that the spider was trying to get me to open the window. So I did, and it immediately ran to the babies, wrapped a single strand of silk around the old webbing, and started dragging swaths of the babies' webbing toward the window.
I have no idea if the room was just dry and they needed some humidity, or if the food had been too scarce for too long. Whatever it was, that parent spider was in full blown panic mode, and managed to effectively communicate their problem to a human. I haven't killed any spiders or insects since (aside from a few particularly asshole-ish mosquitos), and actually keep small water dishes in my bathroom for two spiders who've now lived with me for nearly a year. If any babies hatch inside and get close to me, I use my phone's flash to guide them back to a corner with a light on -- they are seemingly always drawn to the brightest light source.
Spiders are incredible creatures, and I deeply regret not realizing that sooner.