101 YEARS OLD AND STILL A LITTLE ARACHNOPHOBIC...

THE TROUBLE with spiders is all those legs. There is a great deal of psychological research telling us that in general we are only capable of thinking about seven things at a time. We can remember sevendigit phone numbers, for example, but eight can be a problem. Or if seven dots are flashed up before our eyes we can tell how many there are but eight can again be too many.

So when we see a spider or octopus clambering towards us our natural reaction is a combination of fear and suspicion. We can see what seven of its legs are doing and where they are going but the intentions of the eighth leg remain a mystery and a threat.

I have a solution for this but first I must mention another arachnid mystery concerning the threat spiders pose to other spiders, specifically the threat posed by female brown widow spiders to males they mate with.

As you may know, the females have a nasty habit of eating their menfolk after mating but in 2016 researchers reported that males had apparently found an answer to that problem. Several had been seen to mate with immature virgin females which did not see them as a snack afterwards. Despite their immaturity, the girls were fertile and produced offspring just as well as their older sisters.

A paper that has just appeared in the journal Animal Behaviour however shows that it is too early to rejoice. Written by a team from Jerusalem and titled Male Mate Choice In A Sexually Cannibalistic Widow Spider, it shows that male brown widows still tend to choose older females as partners over young ones despite the likely fatality of their choice. “We found no benefits for males in mating with females of their choice,” the researchers say.

I asked a spider why they did it and he just looked at me dreamily and asked whether I had read András Vajda’s 1966 novel In Praise Of Older Women. He was eaten shortly after so I could not pursue the matter. It does not matter however for I think I have a solution.

About 15 or 16 years ago a research project began involving transplanting spider genes into goats. Supported by the US military, the idea was to produce goat milk containing the protein responsible for giving spider thread its immense strength. Then, with luck, a plasma could be extracted from the milk which could be spun to produce a material that would be stronger than kevlar and much thinner. And hey presto: lightweight and cheap bulletproof vests. Unfortunately that dream has never been realised.

Reading about the male brown widows (I suppose “brown dead husbands” would be a better name), I suddenly realised what they have been doing wrong. Instead of transplanting spider genes into goats, we should be transplanting goat genes into spiders to produce four-legged spiders.

The reduction in the number of legs would then stop us being afraid of them and the females wouldn’t bother eating them, as the males are clearly four legs short of a post-coital picnic. One small step for mankind, one might say but a huge relief for arachnids.