by Jon Scieszka
You can get that way when you’re searching for giant spiders—especially when the species in question is as magnificent, as surprising and mysterious, as the Goliath bird-eating spider, Theraphosa blondi.
This is the largest spider on earth. It can weigh three times as much as a mouse. (Think of a Quarter Pounder without the bun, but with hairy legs that could cover your face.) Such a creature deserves widespread fame, and yet so little is known about it that, despite its name, no one even knows what it eats. Although in one of its earliest scientific descriptions the spider was depicted eating a songbird, no one knows if the Goliath actually killed it or whether the bird just dropped dead and the spider scavenged it. Only twice have scientists ever seen Theraphosa blondi kill and eat anything in the wild: Once it was a worm, and another time a primitive amphibian-like creature called a caecilian.
No one knows how long Theraphosa lives (although some of the more than 800 species of tarantulas can live for thirty years). No one even knows if this largest of all spiders, so often sold embedded in Lucite as curios, is endangered by the practice—or endangered at all. Its populations might be thriving, or crashing.
It’s important that people find out. And it’s important that people care. These were among the many reasons I was there in French Guiana, researching this book for kids, the best readers in the world—and animals’ bravest champions.
My other reasons? Sam’s science was cutting-edge, and the work was thrilling. (Some might say too thrilling. “Why don’t you write about kittens?” one of my mother’s friends, shopping for a book for her granddaughter, asked me.)
Few of my friends understood why I would want to spend a couple of weeks purposely seeking large, hairy spiders. But going into this trip, I had had only one fear, and it was in direct opposition to the sentiments most people commonly express about such a venture: I was worried that we wouldn’t find tarantulas.
Up until Sam’s wasp encounter, our day had been going quite well. We were in Borneo at just the right time: Mid-November is the end of the dry season in this tropical country. “The spiders are more active now,” Sam said. The forest around us was as hot as breath, alive with the songs of frogs and the calls of birds. The most auspicious sound to Sam’s ears was the three-toned, off-key wolf whistle of the Screaming Piha—a creature whose calls occur so close to the emergence of the spiders that Sam calls it the Theraphosa Bird.
Sam had given Nic and me a simple chore: “Let’s divide and search for holes with big, hairy legs.” There were plenty of holes to search. Everything makes holes in this red, shallow, bauxite-studded soil: armadillos, toads, wasps, lizards, tortoises, snakes, possums. But the holes of Theraphosa are unmistakable, usually located beneath a branch, a root, or a stone. The ovoid entryway looks like the mouth of a little cave and sports a welcome mat of spun silk. “They’re regular little Martha Stewarts,” Sam said to us.
“It’s best to hunt them going uphill, because the holes are pointing up at you,” Sam said. “If you slip downhill,” he advised sensibly, “you’ll eventually crash into a tree and stop.” This was good, because the slopes were quite steep, often more than 45 degrees, and the ground was covered with giant, wet leaves; rotting logs that give way under you; and the ankle-twisting holes of armadillos. But rolling and crashing into some of the trees here would be unwelcome. One of the palms here, as well as one of the vines, is covered with sharp spikes. And any wound in the tropics gets instantly infected.
Before long, though, and without spilling any blood, we had located our first burrow—“the entrance to the underworld,” Sam called it—and then another. Sam showed us how to lure a tarantula out of its hole by wiggling a “Twizzle” stick in the burrow. Normally tarantulas spend the day in their silk-lined retreats, waiting until night to emerge. But of course tarantulas are ready to seize a good opportunity. In this case, she grabs the stick with her pedipalps, the pair of food-handling legs at the front of the head, and thunders out of her hole—her eight walking feet, each tipped with two hooflike claws, or tarsi, pattering loudly on the leaves of the forest floor. The sight of her takes our breath away. She is not even full-grown, but her head is the size of a fifty-cent piece. Her abdomen is as big as a quarter. She is covered with rich, reddish-brown hairs. Even immobile, she is very animate, alive with senses we can only dream of. Though her eight eyes are nearly blind, she can taste and smell with her hairs and feet. Her curved, black fangs glisten as she pauses, tense and alert, inches from the mouth of her burrow. I have seen wild lions in Africa, tigers in India, and bears in America and Asia. None were more magnificent predators than she.
No fool, she realizes the Twizzle stick is a ruse. Quick as a shudder, she scoots back down into the hole. But not deep. We can still see her lurking just inside the mouth of the burrow as we leave. As we thud by her, she waits, fearless, patient, eternal as the jungle itself.
Later I asked Sam why she didn’t retreat deeper.
“Why should she care?” he answered. “She’s Theraphosa—Queen of the Jungle.”
So, of course, minutes after the wasp stings, Sam swallowed some Benadryl, and we continued on. We had an appointment with the Queen.
There are plenty of tarantulas more venomous than Theraphosa. There are lots of spiders more venomous than any tarantula. In fact, not one species of tarantula has a bite that is deadly to a healthy adult human. (Though there are some whose bite can lay you up for a week.) In much of South America, most of the tarantula species would rather stun you than bite you. And this is actually a powerful deterrent to most tarantula predators, who tend to be smaller than humans and stick their faces farther down tarantula holes. Using rear legs to kick hairs off the abdomen, the spider counts on air currents to carry the hairs to the nose and eyes of its assailant. Because the hairs are covered with tiny barbs, they can be itchy and irritating, causing a wise predator to back away from the tarantula burrow without exploring any further.
Even the crabbiest and most venomous tarantula won’t kill you. Yet the spider inspires a deep, primal awe, like we would accord a tiger or a lion.
This creature has aeons more experience at hunting and killing prey than lions or tigers do. Here is the predator primeval: Tarantulas are among the most ancient of spiders. They have lived on Earth for about 150 million years. Long before the existence of saber-toothed tigers, cave lions, and jaguars, tarantulas were the top predators—not only of their fellow invertebrates but of the early mammals too. Though surely the little Jurassic mammals ate arthropods, like spiders, the early tarantulas were almost certainly hunting these mammals too. And still, in the leaf litter of the primordial rain forest of French Guiana, tarantulas reign supreme.
French Guiana is tarantula paradise. About a dozen species of tarantula are found in this patch of jungle the size of Indiana. Every day we sought and found them, and in so doing, we rode a catapult back to the beginning of time.
In Trésor Reserve each Theraphosa brought a new thrill—even to Sam, who has seen so many. The first one showed us only her legs before she retreated, but even that glimpse was exciting. “Come out!” Sam pleaded with her. “I want to meet you!” And then, to Nic and me, “You know what I really want? An endoscope!” Once, he said, he had worked with an Australian spider specialist who had procured this instrument for probing human intestines and had threaded it down the twisting, dirt burrows of a different spider species. “And at the end,” said Sam, “you get to see the spider biting the tip of the endoscope!” Certainly not the usual view through the instrument.
Sam shined his flashlight back in the tarantula hole. “She’s hunching down,” he said, “thinking, ‘Oh, I really wish he’d go away!’ . . . Oh! Now she’s kicking! She might be kicking hairs! Can you hear her hissing?”
The brave creature! My heart swelled with admiration. Blind, cornered in her hole, this spider was ready to take us on—three monsters whose combined weight was over two thousand times hers! These spiders fear nothing. Just being with them enlarges t
he soul.
At another tarantula hole, a spider courageously fought off Sam’s Twizzle stick. “Strike! Strike! Strike!” Sam narrated as he tried to entice the Bird Eater out. “She’s reared up and not very pleased with me. I don’t think she’s going to come out to play.” But that was okay with Sam, because at that moment we were mapping burrows, and hers was the fifth we had encountered in just two hours. One tarantula had seized his stick and run ten inches out of her burrow, then reared up and showed us her shiny, black fangs. In another, we found a detached leg at the mouth of the burrow. Tarantulas can regrow lost legs, and at times, when a leg is injured, they will pull it off and then eat it for energy—a trick many a human athlete would envy. But this leg was part of an exoskeleton that the spider had freshly molted—like all spiders, they shed their external skeletons and grow new ones. We found the freshly molted spider deeper down the hole. Even the black fangs had been lost, the tarantula sporting newly minted white ones.
I rather wished I could molt my own skin at the end of the day. Drenched in sweat, covered in dirt and bug bites, I ached with exhaustion. So did Nic and Sam. And yet we could not have been happier. “Ah! What a job!” Sam said to us. “Can you believe we get paid to do this?”
On a different day we sought other species of tarantula. We visited a place called “Les Grottes”—the Caves. We went there with Joep Moonen, a Dutch-born botanist so skilled, he once identified a brand-new species of plant growing in a Kmart parking lot (and bestowed upon it the species name Kmartii). To reach the caves, we had to pick our way through a tunnel of rock over slippery boulders. Happily I noticed there were many handholds to steady us, but alas, we were told not to use them. Here, Joep told us, was “a great place to see fer-de-lance,” and it wasn’t a good idea to touch a rock beneath which one of the snakes might well be hiding. “Sometimes you might see two in one day,” Joep said cheerfully. Indeed, we would be lucky to see them—until they bit, causing pain so excruciating that victims often beg to have the affected limb amputated.
We saw no fer-de-lance, but we saw another spectacular creature: a bird the color of a traffic cone who looked like he was wearing a helmet made of half an orange on his head—the male cock of the rock, one of the most dramatically colored birds in the world.
But this, of course, was not what we were after.
Carrying heavy water, camera gear, and scientific supplies (including an unsheathed cooking knife Sam used for digging that would surely impale him if he fell on it), we crossed the hundred-yard-long floor of the entry cave as carefully as we would cross a minefield. Finally, through the tunnel, we saw the great cave, our destination, yawning in front of us. It looked exactly like a giant Theraphosa burrow.
But we were after a much smaller quarry. The loose soil on the floor of the cave was dotted with little volcanoes of dirt—the burrows of the small, cute Holothele. Though these are among the most comment tarantulas in French Guiana, “they are in a spider family no one understands,” said Sam. Another species in this family does an elaborate tap dance as a courtship ritual. Few people think of spiders as being that sophisticated, but Sam has discovered that tarantulas’ lives are far more complex than anyone ever suspected. Some tarantula mothers care tenderly for their babies, for example. “Talk about family values!” he said. One species of tarantula even holds hands at dinner—mother and all her spiderlings. They feed while touching one another’s tarsi, often in a circle around their shared prey.
Here in the cave we had found a sort of nursery for Holothele, though this species does not show maternal care, and the mothers were long gone. I felt a rush of tenderness as one young Holothele dashed out of its burrow, hoping to escape Sam’s waiting pill bottle. He collected seven of the youngsters to bring back to his lab in Ohio, in his checked luggage—which is perfectly legal. French Guiana doesn’t protect its invertebrates, and while airlines back then banned penknives in our luggage, we could carry on as many tarantulas as we wanted.
One night we went out in search of one of the most beautiful and spectacular of all spiders, Ephebopus murinus—the skeleton tarantula, so named for the stunning yellow stripes on its hairy, purple-black legs. Sam says they make the spider look like it is wearing a Halloween skeleton suit.
Earlier in the afternoon, while it was still light, we had located their burrows: distinctive, two-inch-wide, silk-lined funnels leading deep into the red rain-forest soil. Sam marked the burrows with orange flags, and then we left. We would need the flags to find the burrows with our spotlights that night—for it is only at night when these spiders emerge from their silky burrows to hunt.
It’s a fine thing to enter a rain forest at night. Here, the darkness is warm and as heavy as velvet, and we are swallowed by it. We’re surrounded with the breath of the forest, the pulse of insect calls and frog song, the occasional quok! of a black-crowned night heron. We thread through the jungle paths, the shapes of monstrous leaves reaching like hands toward us. Occasionally a firefly floats by. Beetles zoom past our headlamps; moths crash crazily into our faces. In the trees and on the ground we can see the sapphire glow of the eyes of the family of spiders known as Ctenids, or wandering spiders. The light-gathering reflectors in their eyes evolved separately from those of the night-hunting mammals, but for the same reason. Sometimes you can see so many of them that the ground looks like a landing strip. A female wandering spider carrying her babies on her back looks like a piece of gaudy costume jewelry, the spiderlings’ hundreds of eyes glowing blue, the fire of twinkling gems.
But night can be treacherous too. It’s easy to get lost here even in the daytime. A single leaf can be as big as a canoe paddle and obscure an entire path. Now, in the darkness, we find ourselves blundering into the bush. We’re going the wrong way. We’re sweating in the heat. The mosquitoes are swarming. But finally we find the right turn—and we see the orange flags Sam had put there earlier.
We look down—and there, illuminated in the beams of our headlamps, is the skeleton tarantula: About the size of a child’s hand, she sits regal and alert on her throne of silk, just outside the mouth of her burrow. The yellow stripe on each of her eight legs reminds me of the tail of a comet. She is a starburst from the heavens, a star fallen to earth. And it makes me think of Christmas and the Wise Men’s star. I feel so humbled to stand in the pulsing dark before this spider with yellow legs, this creature who tastes with her feet, who sips her prey after killing and liquefying it with her venom. All the horror and sorrow I have endured in my life now seems worth it, for this timeless, alien, electrifying moment.
After a trip like this, you go home, you want to talk about spiders. But people ask you what it was like there. What did you eat? Where did you stay? How was the shopping?
The food was unremarkable. Oddly, for a tropical country, there didn’t appear to be any vegetables anywhere, except in cans. The one store we visited for food smelled faintly of gangrene. I can’t remember much about what I ate except for Benadryl and aspirin. In fact, this was a major food group for Nic and me.
We gobbled these drugs to quell the itching. The forest was full of ticks and chiggers. Sam’s chigger bites outnumbered his freckles and made his legs redder than his hair. But the chiggers weren’t as annoying as the ticks. There were at least two species we could identify: one large, one small. The small ones were the worst, because they were so numerous and so hard to see. You found them dug into your skin in odd places on your body. Nic found one on the sole of his foot. I found one in my palm and another, one morning, inside my nose. Unfortunately an overzealous baggage inspector had confiscated my tweezers on our first stopover, in Guadeloupe, forcing me to discover a new use for credit cards: If you sandwich a tick between your Visa and your phone card, it creates just the right leverage to remove the creature. It was the only use I found for my Visa the entire trip, as it was rejected at the pharmacy in town.
This pharmacy was where we did our only real shopping. Instead of postcards and T-shirts, we bought aspirin, Benad
ryl, and pure rubbing alcohol, because now all our mosquito, tick, and chigger bites were infected—especially Sam’s. I blamed his frightening fever on infected bites gone systemic. But it could have been something else, because before the end of the trip his right ear had swelled shut. At one point I wondered whether I too had managed to acquire a tropical fever, because I ached relentlessly every night. I dismissed this as merely muscular exertion from our day-long bush bashing, the strain of carrying heavy water and equipment up and down slippery, hole-pocked rain-forest slopes all day. I didn’t know it at the time, but part of the problem was that my elbow was dislocated. At the end of each day in the field, we were sweaty, dirty, sore, and covered with so many ticks that, toward the end of the journey, I didn’t even try to remove them all. (When I got home I counted my bites; there were over a hundred of them, each crowned with a little cone of yellow pus.)
And where did we stay? We spent our nights at a nature center, which had rooms with beds and blue mosquito nets, bathrooms with flush toilets and cold rainwater showers. Blessedly there was no TV, no radio, no newspaper, no war, no terrorism. The room came complete with fauna. One night as I sat on my bed, to my delight, I watched a small (and probably nonvenomous) snake crawl out of my shoe. The shower hopped with toads and frogs. Little geckos sped over the walls, clinging to the plaster with their toe pads and calling out to one another in voices that sounded like a coin tapping on glass. The mosquito nets over our beds and the walls were splashed with their red, green, or blue excrement—the color varying with what the lizard had last eaten. I fell asleep each night to the calls of jungle frogs, the watery trills of the nightjars, and the sound of my talented friend and colleague Nic, in his adjacent bed beneath his own mosquito net, scratching his bites.