The giant spider climate story which simply won't die

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.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/11546016/The-scariest-thing-about-global-warming-Giant-super-fast-spiders.html

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.