Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The giant spider climate story is making the rounds again. The story is, if we don’t mend our wicked ways, we’re going to end living a real life version of the blockbuster movie Arachnophobia.
According to The Telegraph;
Forget floods, droughts, sea-level rise and even the melting polar ice caps. Here’s a really compelling reason to worry about global warming. Spiders.
Research has already suggested that there will be more of them – and they will grow bigger – as temperatures rise. Now a new study, published in the journal Experimental Biology, has concluded that they are likely to be able to run faster and therefore, be harder to catch.
The study on which all this nonsense is based, didn’t actually say we will all be overrun by giant super spiders. The researchers just wanted to know what happens, if you put a tarantula on a hot plate. The answer – surprise – is they run around really fast, but they fall over a lot.
So what is it really like to live in a place which is infested with giant tropical spiders? As someone who lives on the edge of a tropical swamp (described by real estate agents as a “delightful tropical lagoon”), I feel qualified to answer this question. I love the spiders. The spiders don’t bother me. What I find annoying is the horse flies, like the huge half inch monster which just bit my ankle. The mosquitoes can be annoying as well. At dusk, the mosquitoes stop pretending they care about insect repellent.
Don’t get me wrong, I love living here. There is no such thing as winter, and the sea is as warm as bathwater, for almost half the year. But with my ankle stinging from that horse fly bite, times like this, I really wish there were a lot more spiders.
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spiders eat mosquitoes, spiders are our friends. So this is a good news story which has been spinned (pun intended).
Yes, natural pest control. I usually have one or two wolf spiders that roam along the ceiling keeping it clean of other pests. When they get too big we just put them outside in the garden. Also have a couple of southern racers (snakes) roaming the landscape to keep away larger “things”.
Actually it has been spun to death.
scientist trains spider to go to door for food in response to bell ringing. Scientist removes legs of spider and observes that spider no longer goes to door for food, thereby proving that spider’s ears are in it’s legs.
Little Miss Muffet
sat on a tuffet
eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
who sat down beside her
And said “We’ll all fry today.”
/CAGW nursery rhyme
Mary had a little lamb,
it’s fleece was white as snow.
But ’cause of AGW the lamb refused to grow.
But then the climate modelers,
(of course to their surprise),
found AGW made all the lambs grow up to giant size.
/CAGW nursery rhyme
Hilarious – my wife Mandy says “I’ll never run out of wool again” 🙂
Next up will be humungoid snakes able to crush and/or swallow you and your EV whole, and bumblebees the size of Volkswagens. With climascifiscience, every day is April Fool’s Day.
Just look up spider bites on Google images. Keep them out of your house, your shed, wherever family or pets can go. Even harmless types can leave a long-lasting injury.
I like the story about the spider injected anaesthetic into a guy in his sleeping bag who woke up to find all of his top lip chewed off.
Spiders are GOOD! They eat plenty of undesirable insects.
There WERE giant insects back in the Permian, but that was because the atmosphere was about 30% Oxygen then, not the current 21%, All arachnids are limited in size by the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere. When the level of oxygen dropped to the current 21% later in the Permian, the giant dragonflies disappeared. For giant spiders to appear, , we’d need oxygen levels to go back up to around 30%, Maybe that’s what the writer is hoping for..
Submit your fear-based paper on climate change/disruption/warming and get a grant. Money for jam.
The Telegraph story was put out by Geoffrey Lean, who delights in lying about sea level rises, melting ice caps and global warming generally.. I would ask him why a little extra warmth creates bigger spiders? Temperature and weather can have an effect on numbers of insects, . which always seem to normalise when the weather and temperature normalise. but I have never heard of it having an effect on size. If it does, then are we to get bigger snails, earwigs, flies, mosquitos, or fleas? And is this a different slant on Darwin’s theory of evolution? Interesting..
I notice the greens don’t report on the plight of the horsefly, rattle snake, anopheles mosquito and other charming creatures under a warming scenario. They get their inspiration from Hollywood.
A paper in pres in Nature will reveal further how rising CO2 will lead to the emergence of a mutant spider-dog hybrid according to reliable computer modelling – this clip is from the supplementary materials:
It gets worse! The jackalope and loggersexual are not myths!!!! What have we done?!?!?!?!?
Canada has done some fine research, investigating the effects of common drugs on spiders:
https://youtu.be/sHzdsFiBbFc
I’d pay to put warmist alarmists barefoot on a hot plate.
Though we’d likely get the same results, it would be research $$$ well spent.
Videos on Youtube of course.
Good yarn, we need to encourage the idiocy.
The tales of cataclysmic climate are going to be the folk lore of the future.
How about these Chinese military-grade hornets?
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/10/08/article-2449483-187F47DC00000578-460_634x423.jpg
Whoa NELLIE!!!
Their nest is probably so large that they have 3-car garage and a game room with a billiard table, bar, and home theater in the lower level.
They look like flying nail guns.
Great, my subconscious has already filed this picture away for future use in nightmares.
I try to post this link on anything to do with spiders
You must have worked with this post’s author so that he and you could post this together. Too FUNNY! Way better than my bugs bunny opera.
Here’s your horsefly main course…
https://youtu.be/d12MV0rzhSU
I was once killed by a team of deer flies.
Me too. It is difficult to use a fly rod while things are biting you faster than you can slap.
Can’t say I have ever tried to catch a spider. Is it something they do in UK? Is it like fishing except with spiders?
Add one more to their failed list of predictions.
In my little world you better not let me catch you killing a black snake or a spider.
Tiny flies seem to inhabit the ‘coffee ground container’ and the spiders that I dare not disturb keep a web of sorts in the window that keep the little flies in check. I really hate it when I need to clean the window over the sink.
Now if you are ever blessed with the presence of a ‘garden spider’ enjoy the intricate web and the beauty of your guest. Just wish I could get one to live in the house!
I‘m all for peaceful co-existence with critters, but I draw the line at my front door.
Flies trying to get in from outside may have just taken off from a pile of poop somewhere, commonly a gift from irresponsible dog owners, and a possible disease vector that does not even make Wikipedia’s list of diseases caused by insects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diseases_caused_by_insects
Needless to say, if a fly lands on my food, I’m done eating that particular dish.
I’ve been battling the tiny flies for the past several months, and I’m envious that you know exactly where yours are breeding, but I think I’ve narrowed my infestation down to the garbage disposal.
Killing fruit flies and other tiny, related Diptera may be accomplished with a vinegar trap. I try to squirt any stragglers on my kitchen window with the familiar blue window-cleaning fluid, and apply the coup de grâce with a paper towel.
I also like to have a look with a magnifying glass at the dead fruit fly. Some are infested with mites, as I was startled nay horrified to discover one day when I saw a tiny dot suddenly shoot out from the dead fruit fly I was examining. For its body size, a mite is said to be the fastest creature on Earth.
https://student.societyforscience.org/article/move-over-cheetah-mite-sets-new-speed-record
When possible, I catch and release outside any insect not on my kill on sight list, which includes flies, mosquitoes, termites & cockroaches.
Outside is a completely different story, of course
Back on topic, it seems the big danger from “sprinting spiders” is that they stagger around when moving too fast, and may fall into your bath, at least according to TheTelegraph article linked by the author.
No word though, on how runaway man-made global warming affects their ability to swim, or if the staggering impairs their ability to avoid climate change.
-☺-
Spiders have eight legs, thousands of eyes, and no mercy. If we face these
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n5w_xXU8jto
we’re doomed.
I don’t know, man. I’ve got a large house spider over here.
These little beauties will eat birds and bats if they get the chance, and snakes…..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpN2fFh78nI
But they shouldn’t be able to get bigger unless atmospheric oxygen goes up
So more CO2/warmer [so 97% percent reckon] /faster spiders but C02 displaces O2 therefore the little critters will remain small
Unlike in the Carboniferous when O2 levels reached 35%.
Bushfires back then must have been spectacular
As we are on the spider stories I’m a bit late to the party but here’s another one.
The World Gliding Competitions were held in South Australia’s Murray River town of Waikerie in 1973.
About a hundred gliders plus pilots and a couple of hundred members of the support crews from all over the world were there for the fortnight or so the competition ran for .
We were up at the end of the “tie down line”, the parking grid where the gliders were tied down after the day’s flying.
This particular morning well down the line there was quite a kerfuffle and a large crowd rapidly appeared around one of the British gliders and it’s pilot so we ambled down to take a look ourselves.
Things had quietened down by the time we got there except for the hilarity amongst the Aussies and Kiwis.
The British pilot had gone to his glider to prepare for the day’ flight, opened the cockpit canopy and there sitting in the middle of his parachute on the seat was this enormous “Tarantula” of varying immense sizes depending on who you talked to but it appeared it was around 8 to 10 cm’s across.
In midst of the resulting hullabaloo one of the local Waikerie bushie types ambled up to have a look and with the crowd standing back a couple of metres in case the “Tarantula” got them and cameras flashing non stop, the Waikerie bushie carefully put his hand down to the “Tarantula” so as not to frighten her and carefully herded her onto the back of his hand from where he displayed aforesaid “Tanrantula” to a fast back stepping crowd while proclaiming that she was a real beauty and a bigg’n wasn’t she plus other suitable embellishments. And he hadn’t seen one as big as this for a long time.
Then he turned around back to the cockpit and very carefully moved that big but harmless fly and insect catching Huntsman spider from his hand and carefully parked her back in the middle of the pilot’s parachute in the cockpit and ambled off.
The aussies along with a number of other “bush” minded types wet themselves laughing.
As for that poor Huntsman spider, a spider which we often had in our farm house over many years sometimes for months or more for an individual who was free to roam through the house catching insects and was always known as “Oscar” , I think somebody eventually rescued him / her and put him / her into a nice quiet spider spot somewhere.
The limiting factor for the size of insects is how much oxygen there is in the air.