Cats are notoriously afraid of cucumbers. This has been exploited a lot online by taking videos of them jumping out of their skins when they encounter them, which is cruel and unnecessary. No-one should be exploited in that way. I presume the reason they’re afraid of them is that they look like snakes and, to humans, smell like copperheads, so perhaps to the more sensitive nose of a cat all snakes and cucumbers smell alike. Copperheads are in the same family as our only venomous British snake, the adder/viper, so maybe they also smell like that. Feline colour vision is not tremendously good but nor is it non-existent, so maybe there’s a green snake in the viper family somewhere who used to be a special threat to cats.
Just to tell you in advance, because of arachnophobia there will be no pictures of spiders in this post. Clearly if you find the topic of spiders in written form triggering, you shouldn’t read on.
Fear of spiders is amazingly common. 6.1% of the global human population has it. It isn’t adaptive here on the whole because there aren’t really any dangerous native species. Although I’m not arachnophobic myself, I used to have a button phobia, so I have a lot of empathy for anyone with this kind of issue. In fact I even wonder if my button phobia is a direct replacement for arachnophobia – my brain did that where other similar brains would be averse to arachnids of a certain kind, but it’s wired differently. It’s notable, and probably quite common, that I have not one shred of phobia of spiders, although there are clearly some dangerous species native to somewhere other than these isles.
During my teens, the local Field Studies Centre, which may have been on Rough Common, held the record for finding the largest individual native spider ever discovered in Britain, the Great Raft Spider, Dolomedes fimbriatus. This has a body up to two centimetres long and waits for prey near the water, onto which she ventures to capture them, and needs to have very long legs in order to spread her weight out and make this possible. Their total span is up to seven centimetres. There’s a rarer relative to this species, the Fen Raft Spider, who is only found in Suffolk. I’m going to explain my pronoun usage now. I generally call spiders “she” because most individuals encountered will be female. Male spiders often fail to survive mating because they get eaten and are smaller. Therefore I say “she”, although there are males. The fact that Fen Raft Spiders are East Anglian and apparently their relatives are common in Kent probably illustrates the position Kent has as a far eastern English county. Although Lowestoft in Suffolk is the oddly uncelebrated easternmost point in Britain, Thanet in Kent is only nineteen minutes of arc further west, which at this latitude is under ten nautical miles. Kent has another interesting distinction regarding arachnids which I’ll mention later.
Spiders are not the only arachnids of course. Also native to Great Britain are the mites, ticks, pseudoscorpions and harvest spiders. In the seas around us there are also pycnogonids, “sea spiders”, but those are not arachnids but form their own group. We don’t have native scorpions, tailless whip scorpions or vinegaroons, although whip scorpions did turn up in one of the ‘Harry Potter’ films. Horseshoe crabs are also close enough genetically to arachnids to be considered members, but this is a new development. I want to focus on spiders here, although I will be saying a couple more things further down.
House spiders seem to be descended from cave spiders. The one I have in mind is Pholcus, and I should point out this is my hypothesis and I can’t back it up with firm evidence. However, animals who live in caves tend to have certain features, including blindness, “blondness” (i.e. they’re pale), spindliness (long extremities), extra sensitive other senses and the ability to thrive in low oxygen conditions due to the lack of photosynthesis. Spiders are pre-adapted to a couple of these. For instance, their vision is poor, they have lots of long legs and are very sensitive to vibration. Pholcus is particularly spindly and pale, and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if it followed us from the caves, although it apparently isn’t clear nowadays whether we ever lived in them permanently rather than using them for ceremonial purposes and temporary shelter. Nonetheless, that didn’t stop rock doves and black headed gulls from becoming ubiquitous in large cities even though humans created those environments, so maybe they do come from caves after all. The problem for such spiders is that they belong in our spaces and we don’t cater for them, and we’re also confronted with the dilemma of what to do if we find spiders inside the house. Do they belong there or outside? There’s an obvious benefit to us as well as them for them to remain indoors if that’s their habitat, as it were.
I decided to do a kind of survey of indoor and outdoor British spiders in response to this, and I’ve come up with the following, which unfortunately I can’t illustrate because of triggering arachnophobes:
Pholcus: “daddy-long-legs” type spider which I’ve just hypothesised were previously cave-dwellers. The males are smaller than the females, as is probably usual, and the spider lives in houses in the south of England, cellars (and possibly attics) in the Midlands and are absent from the North of England. I say this, but my information may be out of date as it may pre-date the adoption of central heating. They could conceivably be confused with harvest spiders (who are not spiders).
Tegenaria: Three species of these, which are yer classic house spider with a stocky body, thick legs and brown bodies. The males are for once longer-leggèd than the females and more likely to wander about for obvious reasons. There are three common species, all domestic. One, T. parietina, is only found in Southeastern England. T. sæva is found more widely but rare in the North of England. This species is not exclusively domestic. Finally, the very common T. domestica is found indoors throughout Britain, and spins funnel webs, capturing insects on their outside and taking them into the tube bit to eat them. This is the spider who was used as treatment for malaria.
Oönops: This is a small pink spider found all over the island, and is nocturnal, hunting small insects on walls and ceilings. She alternates between walking slowly and sprinting, groping for insects in front of her.
Scytodes: The Spitting Spider. This spits both poison and silk to capture and poison prey, and is a Southeastern spider. These are mottled black and fawn with big bodies and long legs too.
Then there are the outdoor spiders who don’t belong in the house and would probably suffer from it:
Araneus diadematus: This is the classic orb web spider with a large bulbous abdomen and white markings (made of guanine, which is a DNA base) on the back. Until I saw ‘Twelve Monkeys’, I didn’t really appreciate that these ordinary-seeming, common or garden animals in Britain may be replaced by entirely different species elsewhere. I thought about vertebrates in this respect a lot, but arthropods not so much. I don’t know much about non-dangerous American spiders but the species in the hospital ward in that film was like nothing I’d ever seen here. However, it seems that A. diadematus is Holarctic in distribution: Eurasia and North America.
Segestria senoculata builds tubes under bark or in masonry, presumably living on houses but not in them.
Meta , rather strangely named, is a second common orb web spinner, but smaller and less bulky. This one definitely does cross over between cellars and caves.
Lycosa is a wolf spider. These have good eyesight and run fast, and are definitely the wolves of the arthropod world, chasing and pouncing on insects. They don’t spin webs but have cocoons for their eggs, and have an elaborate signalling system used in courtship. I suspect that spiders need to have very specific and complex courtship displays because otherwise they would tend to eat or be eaten by potential mates before anything could happen.
Dysdera is more colourful than most of the spiders mentioned so far, with red legs, a pale abdomen and black cephalothorax. They eat woodlice, except for Armadillidium themselves, i.e. the classic woodlouse, whose armour seems to defeat them. They’re unusually long-lived, lasting up to five years with an eighteen month childhood.
Misumena is a common Southern crab spider. These tend to be bright yellow and live in flowers, where they await visiting insects, but unlike most British animals are able to change colour to match that of the petals or rays they live amongst.
Thomisus is another crab spider which is bright pink and lives on heather flowers in the South.
There are lots of other spiders but the most remarkable one in terms of appearance is Eresus, the ladybird spider, who may be extinct here. The males have bright red abdomens with black spots and are fairly shaggy whereas the females are plain and black. I have no idea if there are still any around in this country but they used to live in Cornwall.
Just a couple of words on other arachnids. Although we have no native scorpions here, we do have pseudoscorpions, who are small very scorpion-like arachnids with claws but no tails or stings. These include Lamprochernes, who used to live in the compost heap when I was a child in Kent and hitch rides on insects and harvest spiders, Chelifer, also common, Cheiridium, who lives in old books and eats booklice, but presumably used to do something else, Allochernes, who lives under tree bark in the South and cohabits with ants. I may also have seen this one. This one lives off the ovaries of her mother after hatching, so it’s a little like a mammal in that respect. Dactylochelifer lives on dunes on sandy beaches along the East coast and is one of the largest British pseudoscorpion, though still only three millimetres long. Further down the beach lives Neobisium, in rock crevices, where they spin silken cells to moult in. On the East Anglian coast, N. carpenteri is the largest of all British pseudoscorpions and is also found in Ireland.
A few things emerge about arachnids from this survey. One is that, like much of the rest of the biosphere, there is more biodiversity in the South and East of these islands than in the West and North, but unlike many other species there isn’t a concentration of biodiversity in the Southwest but in the Southeast. I imagine this is because the majority of arachnids spread here from what became France just after the ice age, when the permanent ice cover and tundra had drastically reduced it. Another is that pseudoscorpions in particular seem to do well in terrain which is relatively close to what might be found in deserts elsewhere in the world, although they are most un-desert-like here. However, they also do well in the driest parts of the islands.
Germane to this is the single naturalised population of true scorpions in Britain, Euscorpius flavicaudis. The European yellow-tailed scorpion lives mainly in Southern Europe but has one naturalised community of ten thousand individuals living in the cracks in the walls of a harbour on the Isle of Sheppey in northern Kent. Although it makes me happy that we have scorpions living with us, it’s sad that they aren’t native. It’s also unsurprising that they live in an unusually dry part of the country. This makes me wonder about Dungeness.
I want to make one final observation. Back in 1989, I lived in a house in Highfields, Leicester and had a very happy time there. I eventually had to leave because I got abducted and my kidnapper knew my address. As I stepped over the threshold for the final time, a harvest spider did so with me, and I felt it was the spirit of the house leaving with me. Ever since then I’ve felt an affinity with harvest spiders and regard them as the form my dæmon would take as in ‘His Dark Materials’.
A Box Of Chocolates 