My name is Jessie, and I will be your teacher for today.
This class is all about your basic spiders and some hunting techniques.
Are Spiders Our Friends?
What do Spiders look like?
What Spiders to avoid?
There are many different kinds of spiders, but we will only be concerned with a few for this class. We will talk about the Black Widow, Tarantula, Daddy-Long-Legs, Ground Spider, Jumping Spider, Brown Recluse and the common Household Spider.
WHY ARE SPIDERS OUR FRIENDS? Even though they can bite, spiders are our friends. They eat more insects than birds do, humans like that you know. Spiders don't see very well, and if you stay more than a foot away from them and stand or sit very still, they can't even see you, and they certainly can't bite you.
WHAT DO SPIDERS LOOK LIKE? Spiders have a head and an abdomen (belly). They have 8 legs and up to 8 eyes. Spiders have tiny hairs and claws on their legs that help them feel when a bug is in their web. The little claws also help to cut the silk when they are weaving their web. Spiders come in many colors, from clear to yellow to green to black. Girl spiders are much bigger than boy spiders. (Daddy-Long-Legs are not true spiders because they don't have a distinct head and a body. They just have one little circle of a body with everything on it and 8 long skinny legs sticking off of it.
WHAT ABOUT SPIDER WEBS? The spiders that weave webs use silk to do this. They make the silk out of their own bodies and jump from tree branch to tree branch to make their web. Each kind of spider makes a different kind of web. Some of the strands in the web are sticky, to catch bugs, but some are dry. The spider walks on the dry strands so she doesn't get stuck. She usually waits in the center of the web, with one of her legs touching a strand, when she feels the strands jiggle, she goes to find the bug that is caught in the web. If it is just a leaf, or a really big bug that could tear up the web, the spider will cut the strands holding it, so it will fall out of the web. If she needs to rebuild a web, she will eat the broken web pieces and digest them. This helps her make more new silk. Nothing is wasted. (Spider webs are so strong that some native peoples twist the webs to make fishing nets. Others use the web for Band-aids.)
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Summary
Friday, 04-Jan-02 14:58:18 EST
