NERD NITE NYC AND NERD NITE LACAMEL SPIDERS: The Rumors of My Size Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
by Forest Ray, PhD
The first camel spider I saw failed to impress me. Don’t blame the spider, though—my own expectations were set much too high.
Iraq hadn’t yet fallen when my own deployment orders came, but tales of eight-legged behemoths whose jagged mandibles could turn flesh to pudding were already making the rounds, giving us new reasons to “stay alert, stay alive.”
That first camel spider skittered through the light of my flashlight while I was on guard duty in Kuwait, as we massed to cross the border. The soldier I stood guard with and I followed it with our lights to get a better view. Sure enough, we had encountered our very first camel spider. It was … small.
Camel spiders range in length from roughly two to six inches, with most species closer to the lower end of the range. Those found in the Middle East, however, often grow to between five and six inches in length. Not exactly the stuff of monster movies, but speaking as someone who has been woken up by a tarantula on his chest, I can assure you that terror comes in all sizes.
Stories told of camel spiders certainly do their best to inspire terror, starting with their name. The story—its dominant variation, anyway—is that they earned their association with camels by latching onto the dromedaries and eating them from the underside. Some stories grant the spiders the decency of waiting for the camels to die first, others don’t.
Like any great attempt at misinformation, these claims can be tested. Even in the absence of a camel spider, the next time you find yourself next to a camel, poke it in the belly to see if it lacks a self-defense mechanism.
The Great Camel Spider Misinformation Campaign begins, in fact, with the creatures’ name. Camel spiders are not spiders at all. They belong to an order of animals called Solifugae, Latin for “fleeing the sun.” Other common names include wind scorpions and sun spiders, and it should be noted that they are also not scorpions.
They are, however, to paraphrase Eleanor Shellstrop in The Good Place, some ugly motherforkers, at least by humanity’s questionable standards.
Perhaps this is why, in the time-honored human tradition of mocking those unlucky enough to have not been born beautiful, so many false stories about them exist.
Beginning with their misleading name, they are said to kill and eat camels, to grow as long as a human forearm, to run at speeds of up to 25 miles an hour and jump up to six feet. Even if you outrun them, they can haunt your sleep, where their venomous bite numbs your flesh, which they strip from your bones. Whatever flesh they don’t tear from your body might fall off later, anyway, due to their conveniently multifunctional venom. Oh, and they may also feel inclined to lay some eggs in you for good measure.
We can all feel fortunate that we face no danger of being eaten alive by these little guys, or of becoming unwilling surrogate parents.
In fact, camel spiders aren’t venomous and are unlikely to even attempt to bite a human, much as most people wouldn’t just stick a pocketknife into something 100 times their size. I mean, sure, there’s always one. As my drill sergeant once said before a field exercise: “I don’t want to see any of you white boys fucking with the wildlife! Seriously, why do you do that?”
I don’t know, Drill Sergeant. I honestly don’t know …
Although we need not fear being excarnated by a camel spider, it’s easy to see where that particular myth comes from. Their mandibles consist of a double set of pincers called chelicerae, which look like the result of a crab bumping uglies with the Predator.
Extending outward from their chelicerae are two appendages, called pedipalps, that look like a bonus set of extra-long legs. These are covered in coarse, sticky hair that helps the camel spider grab its prey and bring it to the wood chipper of its chelicerae.
Camel spiders also use their chelicerae for both survival and mating. Simultaneously. This one is not a myth.
After traveling long distances—camel spiders are quite solitary—to find a female, a male camel spider will creep up on its unwitting potential mate and delicately “massage” her with his pedipalps in an effort to induce a catatonic state of torpor. So that she doesn’t kill him. While this sounds objectively terrible by human standards, it gets much worse.
In order to seal the deal, the male needs to get his ball through the net, so to speak, without losing focus on the ongoing life-or-death massage. And due to some questionably intelligent design on the part of camel spider anatomy, this involves one of several complicated maneuvers.
In one, he uses his chelicerae to position the female, then gets his sperm on them and uses them to transfer said sperm into her genital opening. In another, the male first uses his chelicerae to “chew” or massage the female’s abdomen and move away from her as she begins to exit torpor. Before she fully regains her senses (assuming all goes according to plan), he releases a capsule of sperm called a spermatophore, which he grabs with his chelicerae and plunges into the female’s genital opening. Then he runs like hell.
There is actually a genus within the Solifugae—the Eremobates—that simply transfers the spermatophore directly from the genital opening of the male to the genital opening of the female. This is much less fun to describe.
For the truly deviant, the female camel spider’s response to the male’s pedipalps may be a purely mechanical reaction, as the same behavior has been witnessed in response to being handled in field and laboratory settings. You pervs.
Other myths revolve around the camel spider’s physical capabilities. Legend has it that they can run up to 25 miles per hour and jump three to six feet into the air, and that they can and will aggressively chase humans down.
To be fair, camel spiders can hustle at up to 16 miles per hour, but they don’t jump much at all. That won’t stop them from chasing you.
If you find a camel spider hiding in your shadow and run, however, they will likely give pursuit. This is not out of any innate aggressiveness but rather because they were using your shadow to escape the sun and you rudely moved it.
I fear I’m coming off as a bit of a downer—one of those annoying scientists who steals away the world’s mysteries and replaces them with cold and uncaring facts. I’ll end, then, with an unsolved camel spider mystery.
As scary as some humans might find these desert-dwelling arachnids, we have almost nothing to worry about. Ants, however, are not so lucky.
Camel spiders will sometimes roll up on an anthill, massacre the colony, and tear up the nest. The marauding solifugid can tear apart an entire ant army with ease, while totally impervious to its prey’s counterattacks. Giving no quarter, the miniature avatar of Shelob presses its offensive into the anthill itself, tearing up the earth in its frenzied assault.
For all the energy that camel spiders spend mowing down ants and sacking their homes, however, they have not been witnessed eating the ants, leaving their motive for the attacks an enigma. One leading hypothesis is that the camel spiders burrow into the nests to eat the ant larvae hidden within, but this remains so far unproven.
This murderous habit of the camel spider lingers as a mystery to be solved by those too curious not to fuck with the wildlife.
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Forest Ray is a former paratrooper and current science reporter based in Long Beach, California.
NERD NITE MIAMIMILITARY MARINE MAMMALS: Dolphins So Smart They Should Give Their Own Nerd Nite Presentation
by Laura Chaibongsai
Most scientists would tell you that humans are the smartest animal in the world. Our large brain size, number and density of neurons, and ability to both communicate and use tools place us at the top of the intelligence charts. However, I live in Florida and have personally met “Florida man” so I have my doubts.
Bottlenose dolphins on the other hand are also extremely intelligent and don’t throw alligators through drive-thru windows or try to stop hurricanes by shooting at them (#FloridaMan).
Dolphins have a similar relative brain size (encephalization quotient) as humans, they communicate with whistles and clicks, and they have the ability to learn, apply knowledge, and even recognize themselves. They can alter their surroundings and use tools; some dolphins will cover their rostrum with a sponge to protect themselves as they dig up prey from the ocean floor. And most important, many believe dolphins have sex for fun, so obviously they’re smart.
In addition to their brilliance and trainability, bottlenose dolphins can dive to nearly 1,000 feet and have sophisticated natural sonar, so they make excellent partners for the US Navy. Since 1959, the US Navy has been training dolphins to detect underwater mines and locate “unauthorized” swimmers or divers near their harbors in the United States and abroad. These highly trained service members mark a mine or attach a device to the diver and return to their boat unharmed for a fishy treat.
Navy seals, well, actually, sea lions, are also an integral part of the navy’s Marine Mammal Program. California sea lions have the ability to dive deep, can maneuver through tight, cluttered areas like harbors, and have excellent vision and hearing. The navy has relied on them to recover equipment that is dropped into the ocean—the navy’s gear isn’t cheap, so they want it back!—as well as patrol harbors like dolphins do.
In addition to their service to the military, navy dolphins and sea lions have been the focus of over 1,200 scientific publications throughout 60-plus years of research, ranging from studies on sleeping behavior to the impacts of oil exposure after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, contributing greatly to our understanding of both captive and wild marine mammals.
While someday soon robots or drones will take over most of their tasks, the technology may never match the exceptional skills of the dolphins and sea lions who have supported the US military for over sixty years.
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Laura Chaibongsai is a marine science nerd and the boss of Nerd Nite Miami. As a professional science communicator, Laura specializes in citizen science, community engagement, research development, and finding creative ways to translate ridiculously complex research topics for nerds of all ages and backgrounds!
NERD NITE MADISONSEX CATAPULTS!
by Ben Taylor
Catapults: They’re amazing! Stored potential energy rapidly released as forward motion to launch missiles, basketballs, watermelons, and even flying cars through the air. We know them, we build them, we love them. But humans are not alone in our adoration of the contraption, for while nature may abhor a vacuum, she loves a nasty catapult. And nature puts catapults in one fun place in particular—namely, the bodies of arthropods.
Arthropods, from Greek for “jointed foot,” are a group of animals made up of insects, crustaceans, spiders, and the various creepy-crawlies of the planet. The jointed limbs in the hard chitinous exoskeletons of arthropods act as ideal spots for springs, locks, and hydraulic mechanisms that release stored energy in a near instant when triggered. Arthropods are catapult creatures.
Take, for example, the extreme release of stored power in the bite of the trap-jaw ants. Hundreds of different ant species have evolved a mechanism in their mouths similar to a bow and arrow, which latches open their mouthparts when they’re awaiting prey or preparing to escape a threat. When triggered, the mandibles snap shut at speeds up to 2,300 times faster than a blink of a human eye. This allows for the instantaneous snagging of food, or in some cases an evasive maneuver where the ant releases its jaws against the ground to launch itself through air and away from danger.
Most arthropodal catapults, called modes of kinematic transmission, have evolved as a means of both predation and defense. But in April 2022, a paper published in Current Biology changed everything. Scientists at Hubei University in China, writing about the male hackled orb weaver spider, described a behavior that very much utilizes catapults for sex. Why does the male hackled orb weaver care about catapults during sex?
To start, the female hackled orb weaver spider is way larger than him—nine times larger. As if that didn’t make sex intimidating enough, the female hackled orb weaver spider engages in post-coital snacking, mainly on her male partner. This George Costanza–esque sexual cannibalism is seen in many size-dimorphic pairings, perhaps most famously with the praying mantis (for with praying mantises, the male is always giving head), and is an extremely efficient way of getting extra protein for egg production. It’s just not super ideal for the male if he wishes to live and mate another day. So this hackled orb weaver spider has evolved a very special catapult, on a very special part of his body. And we’re not talking about boner stuff. We’re talking hydraulics, another catapult-friendly aspect of the bizarre and beautiful bodies of arthropods.
Instead of typical veins and capillaries, arthropods push blood and fluids through their system using a massive tubular heart that stretches the length of their bodies. Imagine squeezing a condom full of blood. Go on. Imagine it. When you squeeze that extra-large condom full of red, red blood, you force fluid to rocket to the parts of the condom outside the zone of your squeeze. You force those portions of the condom to quickly expand with the force of the sudden hydraulic pressure of your squeeze. You have made a liquid catapult of sorts, and this is how nature makes it happen with male hackled orb weaver spiders.
This catapult is on the spider’s skinny front legs, each thinner than a human hair. During copulation, the male hackled orb weaver bends its jointed legs against the mounted female, as though preparing a tiny push-up against her. When mating is over and mealtime set to begin for the female, powerful muscles in the male spider’s thorax smash body fluids into its folded forelimbs, and the resulting hydraulic force catapults the spider off the female at speeds up to three feet per second. The male lives to mate another day, and scientists even observed one male catapulting his way out of bed six times in eight hours. Not bad, little male hackled orb weaver spider.
And that is the beauty of arthropods. All that potential hydraulic energy, just sloshing around: might as well force it into a forelimb so you can escape from bed without having to be the post-sex room service as well.
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Ben learned a love for insects growing up in the mountains of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his degree in entomology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and spent the following year chasing native bees through Wisconsin apple orchards. He has been stung in the face. Ben has served as a youth programs coordinator at the National Museum of Natural History and is currently the education manager at the Horticultural Society of New York. He has been the boss of Nerd Nite Madison and Nerd Nite DC and currently guest-hosts Nerd Nite NYC.
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