Well, this is discouraging.

Scientists asked almost 1,800 people to rate 25 species of animals according to how much fear and disgust a photo of each one elicited. The spider got equally high rankings for both fear and disgust from more people than any other animal. The spider was also deemed the scariest and nearly the grossest as well.

I find myself snuggled up in the top right corner of that chart. No wonder nobody likes me.

But there are some words of hope.

Ecologist and self-proclaimed spider ambassador Bria Marty tested whether learning about spiders can change how people feel about them for her master’s thesis project at Texas State University in San Marcos. She recruited college students to find and identify spiders using an illustrated guide and then upload photos to iNaturalist. Marty, currently a PhD student at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, surveyed participants before and after the activity, and one thing jumped out: Afterwards, people reported being far less likely to react negatively to a spider. “Doing an activity like this really does help a lot around fear,” she says.

This kind of change has been known to happen to iNaturalist users, says Tony Iwane, the platform’s outreach and support coordinator and a self-described spider lover. He pointed me to a thread on the site’s discussion forum about how contributing to iNaturalist helped people overcome their fear of spiders, with users sharing the “gateway spider” species that changed how they felt. For @mira_l_b, it was the particularly tiny Salticid (jumping spider) species Talavera minuta. “If I am finding myself confronting life-long fears and cooing sweetly to tiny Salticidae,” she wrote, “then there’s hope for us all!”

The author is advocating a big spider counting exercise for everyone, which sounds like a good idea to me. Except this is not the best time of year for it — spiders are making themselves scarce right now, hiding from the winter onslaught, but you can still find lots of spiders in your houses.

So go find them and say hello!

Some spiders have a serious problem: runaway evolution sometimes produces maladaptive conditions. Here’s a spider, Tidarren sisyphoides, that exhibits extreme sexual dimorphism — males have about 1% of the mass of the females.

Male and female T. sisyphoides in copula. The minute male (indicated by the arrow) on the female’s ventrum is ≈1% of the female’s mass. (The scale bar represents 1 mm.)

That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that the males maintain a massive pair of palps. Really gigantic. They probably clang when they walk. Look at these two big boys, and the monster intromittent organs dangling from the front of their faces.

You may notice that the top spider has the normal two palps, which are so large that they’re interfering with each other. The bottom spider has only one palp. The surprise is that this is a product of self-mutilation.

During copulation, males generally use both pedipalps in an alternating fashion to inseminate the paired spermathecae in the female. In Tidarren, however, one pedipalp is removed (either left or right pedipalp, seemingly at random) before sexual maturation which has also been described for another spider of similar size and closely related to Tidarren (Echinotheridion). Just after molting to the penultimate instar, the male secures one of its pedipalps to a silk scaffold and then twists it off by turning in circles and pushing the bulb with the third and fourth pairs of legs.

Ouch. There’s a reason for their partial emasculation, though.

We found that, for male Tidarren sisyphoides, maximum speed increased (44%) significantly and endurance increased (63%) significantly after pedipalp removal. Furthermore, spiders with one pedipalp moved approximately 300% greater distances before exhaustion and had a higher survival after exertion than those with two pedipalps. Removal of the pedipalp may have evolved in male Tidarren because of enhanced abilities to search for females (higher endurance and survival after exertion) and to out-compete rival males on the female’s web (higher maximum speed). Our data also highlight how the evolution of conflicts can result in the evolution of a novel behavior.

Not recommended for humans, unless your testicles are the size of basketballs.

Ramos M, Irschick DJ, Christenson TE (2004) Overcoming an evolutionary conflict: removal of a reproductive organ greatly increases locomotor performance. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 101(14):4883-7.

My students talked about their work today — this picture was taken before the crowds put them to work.

Violet took full advantage of the medium, a big screen connected to a laptop, and instead of a static display, the ‘poster’ rotated through a big collection of images. They had the prettiest poster of the group, as long as spiders are considered to belong to the category “pretty”.