Another Thursday Spider Story...

Imagine that a spider couldn't bite you, so he simply crushed you instead. Gruesome, right?

Either way it's not a pretty picture, at least to me. If I had to choose, I don't know which I would go for. But lucky for me, I'm not an insect and hopefully won't be faced with that choice any time soon!

Crushing

Spiders are soup eaters. Once a bug gets tangled in a web, the itsy bitsy spider will come along and inject it with venom, both to kill it and to begin the digestion process by turning its insides into a smoothie. However, uloborid spiders are unique in that they don’t have venom glands. That should mean that they’d have to wait for their victims to die of starvation or boredom before it’s safe to get close to them (you don’t want to risk getting stung by a bee while you’re trying to drool digestive juices over it). But spiders aren’t really known for their patience. Since uloborid spiders can’t intoxicate their prey, they use other, less humane ways to deal out death. They repeatedly wrap a captured insect in webbing, over and over and over, sometimes for as long as an hour. After, oh, around 28,000 loops and 400 feet of silk the bug is dead, either through suffocation or because it’s been crushed to death in the ever-tightening cocoon. Uloborids use their webbing to create a straitjacket of death. They’re like the pythons of the arachnid world.

Seems like a horrible way to go, if you ask me. I may have trouble sleeping tonight just thinking about this. Did I mention that I hate spiders?

Coffee in the kitchenm again this morning. It's chilly out on the patio.