by Gordon Grice
The biggest modern crocodilians don’t grow over thirty feet, but that’s still bigger than most of the dinosaurs. The crocodile eats whatever it wants, from fish to porcupines. The African crocodile, which is not the biggest variety, swallows warthogs whole. One was seen pulling a two-ton rhinoceros into the water by its snout before drowning and eating it. In World War II, Allied forces trapped a thousand Japanese infantrymen in a stretch of mangrove swamp on an Indonesian island. Twenty of the thousand came out alive, most of the others eaten by crocodiles in the night. Crocodiles still reduce the world’s human population by several thousand each year. They take people in Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Once in a while even the supposedly harmless American alligator eats somebody.
The crocodilians have been around for 170 million years or so. From the time of the dinosaurs to the present “rule” of humanity, the crocodile has been swimming quietly in rivers and oceans, dining on members of the ruling parties, spilling more royal blood than Richard III. The reptile clan have specialized in many different ways, even introducing a successful line of venomous snakes—which the crocodilians eat, along with such venerable reptiles as the shell-protected turtle.
The crocodile’s success debunks a common misconception about evolution: that further-evolved animals replace outmoded, unsuccessful ones. Even though reptiles (and mammals and birds) have evolved an enormous number of successful body designs since the crocodile came on the scene, the crocodile’s “primitive” design has never failed. People like to think evolution means getting better, when all it really means is getting different. Extinction is not bound up with evolution as tightly as one might think. In fact, except for a few special cases, we don’t know why species die out. It’s a hot topic in biology.
The “primitive” predators likely to flourish unchanged while their descendants evolve into far different forms usually have a simple design, which usually means a big, dangerous mouth. Such predators are generalists, capable of killing a wide variety of prey. Consider the crocodile and the great white shark, both millions of years old without substantial change. They don’t kill with snares, cooperative group hunting, or even much intelligence. They just bite, often killing by sheer mechanical injury.
Experts call the tarantula a primitive spider not only because of the skills he lacks, but also because of a few anatomical differences from the later models. (He’s not the most primitive spider—a big, tarantulalike Asian critter, with a segmented abdomen, holds that honor— but the tarantula is the most primitive spider you’re likely to see.) Like the white shark and the crocodile, the tarantula is a simple generalist with big fangs, and a long-term survivor. Today it prospers around the world, in habitats from desert to rain forest.
The tarantula’s wait-and-ambush lifestyle has proved so successful that the spider clan has since rediscovered it many times. For example, the entire group called wolf spiders are members of the later, “advanced” type. They’re not related to tarantulas; they’re web-makers who went back to living in burrows and springing on passing prey.
Late one night, as I sat up reading, a spider the size of my palm sauntered out from behind the couch. It was a rabid wolf spider (“rabid” is part of its common name). After a chase and much dishevelment of the furniture, the rabid wolf became a guest in my water jug. I fed her for a few days. She took prey the way a tarantula does, pouncing and seizing. Eventually I introduced her to Prima, her even bigger neighbor in the next container. The rabid wolf didn’t last a full second.
I thought of the ten-foot crocodile whose stomach was found to contain a four-foot crocodile. For the simple predators, size is everything.
I caught June beetles for the medium-sized female we called Harriet. The first beetle I put into her cage waddled directly to her as if offering himself for sacrifice. She put a foot on his back, tasting him at a distance to see if he was worth killing. When she seized him he broke with a sound like a walnut cracking. I tossed in another June beetle. Without dropping the first, she snatched up the second, crunching both into a ball, which she continued to work with her fangs.
I put in another beetle. And another. She kept snatching them up, never dropping a morsel. I had caught only six, and soon the whole half-dozen hung from her fangs in a ball glistening with digestive fluid. Her fangs worked away, more like machetes than the hypodermic needles spider fangs are usually compared to.
Food starts to fall apart after a few seconds of such treatment. Harriet’s wad of June beetles was apparently becoming too sloppy for her taste. She put it on the cage floor and stood over it, arching her back so that her spinnerets aimed straight at the mess. Those two spinning organs on her hind end worked with the dexterity of human fingers as she threw fine silk. She rotated in place as she spun, her spinnerets always aimed at the mess of beetles. Soon she had webbed the mess into a neat bundle. She settled down to suck the juices out.
The tarantula is the largest and strongest spider. The largest and strongest kind of wasp is called the tarantula hawk. The feud between these two giants fascinates people who follow wildlife; it is among the naturally dramatic predator rivalries, like cougar and coyote, lion and hyena, sperm whale and giant squid. The spider is primitive, a generalist predator whose kin have long since evolved tool-using specialties and left its brutal hunting methods behind. The wasp, far from primitive, is one of the most specialized animals on earth, and its specialty is hunting tarantulas. Their encounters usually end in the most horrible death imaginable.
As I write, the particular tarantula hawk I want to tell about sits on my desk, dead. I captured it in a gravel parking lot outside a truck stop a few years after the rainy summer during which I kept my first four tarantulas. Measured in a straight line (rather than along the many curves of its body), it is a shade under two and a half inches long from the outer coils of its antennae to the tip of its stinger, though the stinger of this one is mostly retracted. When a hawk is planning to sting, its stinger protrudes another quarter of an inch. This one’s veined wings span three and a quarter inches—bigger than the rim of the coffee mug sitting beside it. Its legs are longer than its wings. In warmer, wetter places some hawks double these dimensions.
Trucks had parked on this lot for years, and the previous night’s rain had summoned the smell of petroleum from the ground. The hawk flew in figure eights over the landscape of gravel, mud ruts, oil stains, and sickly weeds. As she skimmed near me, I caught a whiff of an odd smell like that made by ants when they sting in a mass. Touching down abruptly, the hawk walked in rapid zigzags, her coiled antennae wiggling. Her black body seemed surrounded by an orange cloud, as if electric shocks were exploding around her so fast as to be only subliminally visible. Only when she stood still could I see this aura had been made by the motion of fast-beating wings. Their dull orange color was one I’d seen elsewhere only in wood fires, at the hazed border of flame and smoke.
Her zigzag walk reminded me of a bloodhound. Abruptly she took the air and circled, her circles lowering and tightening toward the spot she’d taken off from. She landed and walked a circle of a few inches, then vanished.
I came closer. The hole in the ground peeked from a camouflage of gravel and withered weed stem. Barely perceptible traces of silk tapered from the hole. The hawk came backing out; a tarantula came out facing her in a lockstep dance, his impossibly large shape seeming to unfold from the slender opening.
The hawk led the dance away from the burrow. The tarantula followed in a dreamy slow motion. The hawk stopped backing and began to feel the spider all over, like a shopper testing the produce. She crawled the tarantula’s body, even turning upside down to scoot underneath like a mechanic checking for leaks. The tarantula obligingly lifted himself higher to give her room.
Suddenly the tarantula shrugged off his hypnotic stupor and made that fatal twitch, snatching at the hawk, but the hawk had already positioned herself to advantage. The two rolled over and over, knocking bits of gravel around. Suddenly the tarantula contracted and flop
ped onto his back. He had been stung, probably in the juncture of a leg with the cephalothorax. His legs flexed rhythmically, as if washed by invisible waves.
The hawk flew off toward a fringe of weeds that grew along a chain-link fence. I came closer and prodded the tarantula with a weed stem. He kept flexing, unaffected by the poking. I saw the hawk rise from the weeds and backed off to a respectful distance. I have heard the hawk’s sting is incredibly painful, far worse than the fiery stab of a paper wasp.
The hawk returned to the tarantula. Taking a massive leg in her jaws, she lugged the body toward the weeds. When she had gone less than a foot, she once again abandoned the body to visit the weeds. I followed her, but couldn’t see exactly where she went. I had seen other kinds of predatory wasps tackle smaller spiders, and in one species I had noticed the odd habit of checking the prepared grave, a deep tunnel, repeatedly. The wasp sticks her head into the tunnel and flitters her wings. Maybe she’s making sure no prowler waits to catch her when she is burdened with groceries, or maybe she’s just resting.
I guessed the hawk suffered from the same compulsion. She dragged the tarantula a little farther on each trip, frequently pausing to visit her hidden tunnel in the weeds. I knew what fate awaited the tarantula there. The hawk would deposit an egg on his abdomen. A wormlike larva would hatch from that egg and devour the tarantula, taking a few weeks to finish the huge meal and saving the major organs for last.
Of course, a dead spider would rot before the larva could hatch. That’s why a mother hawk carefully places her sting to leave the tarantula alive but paralyzed. Spiders removed from wasp burrows have been found to last at least nine months in this condition. In the burrow, however, the larva soon eats some major organ and kills its host. Grown fat and indolent, the wormlike parasite falls into the sleep of pupation. The spider’s hairs and carapace decay in the soil as the larva at their center transforms into a gleaming hunter.
It was too horrible to allow, so I decided to intervene. Either that, or I wanted the two combatants for my collection—who knows his own motives? Anyway, I rummaged in a nearby garbage barrel until I found a plastic margarine bowl with a lid. When I returned, the hawk was lugging away at the tarantula noiseless and patient in his paralysis. I clapped the bowl over the odd couple. The hawk buzzed and thumped against the plastic. Somehow I worked the lid onto the bowl, capturing the hawk and leaving the tarantula out.
The hawk died in a day or so—they usually do in captivity. Now her cat-eyed, hunchbacked, long-legged carcass sits on my desk. Once in a while I stare at the stinger and contemplate my stupidity.
The tarantula’s fate was far stranger.
I brought him home and laid him out on a paper plate. He was only paralyzed, so reviving him should have been possible, I reasoned. I moistened the bristles around his mouth. I looked him over with a magnifying glass, trying to find the stung spot, but I never did. I poked him with a pencil. I blew on his belly, trying to push oxygen into his simple lungs. That was all I could think of to do, so I left him alone.
I decided I might as well consider him dead. I planned to preserve the tarantula, but I didn’t get around to it for a while. The matter was not hygienically urgent because, unlike a truly dead animal, this one wouldn’t rot for months. When I finally went to stick the tarantula into a jar of vinegar, I found him standing up on the paper plate cleaning a forefoot with his mouth. As soon as I felt sure I wasn’t really having a heart attack, I prodded him into a cigar box. He lived in a terrarium for about a month, walking about in a tentative, uncoordinated gait, occasionally bursting into a spastic frenzy of gestures. He ate an occasional grub, but soon began to shrivel. I found him lying flat one morning, soft as a silk glove.
If you put a predatory wasp, even a tarantula hawk, into a tarantula’s cage, the tarantula makes a nice meal of it. A tarantula could do the same to a hawk that attacks it in the wild. Those ragged scimitar fangs would reduce the wasp to pulp in a second.
The hawk is fast, and it’s one of the strongest insects. Its long legs, movable head, large eyes, and shearing mandibles give it abilities reminiscent of that awesome predator, the mantid. But it shouldn’t be any match for the tarantula, which can be ten times heavier. The hawk has its sting, but the tarantula has its venomous bite: either one can paralyze the other with one shot.
Somehow the hawk casts a hypnotic glamour over the tarantula. So strong is this spell that some species of hawk dig their burrows only after finding and examining the tarantula, which means the tarantula simply stands around for an hour or so waiting to be stung. The hawk only casts its spell when it’s specifically hunting tarantulas; that’s why it gets eaten if you capture it and throw it to a captive spider. Furthermore, each species of hawk seems to match a species of tarantula; a hawk can’t hypnotize the “wrong” kind of tarantula, and if it tries, it dies—the ultimate in predatory specialization.
Hypotheses to explain the spider’s trance are numerous. Maybe the hawk’s odor reveals that it’s emitting a hypnotic chemical. Maybe the hawk’s pattern of touching the spider hypnotizes it—a method used by Franz Mesmer, the pioneer hypnotist of human subjects. Maybe the tarantula is a simpleton, responding to stimuli in a few stereotyped ways, and the hawk knows how not to trip its fight response. Maybe the hawk mimics the sexual advances of another tarantula.
We really don’t understand how the tarantula hawk entrances the tarantula. But then, we don’t understand how human hypnosis works, either.
“It was nailed to a tree out on my granddaddy’s farm,” my friend said. “I suspect Satanists. Anyway, I thought you might want it. Nobody else would.”
A dog’s skull. On top of the domed region that used to encase a brain, the round entrance wound of a bullet. On the hard palate beneath, the exit wound, smaller than a nickel. The dog must have been shot point-blank. Maybe it had been rabid. Now the skull was bare, picked and long since abandoned by ants and carrion beetles. Its long cuspids wiggled in their sockets at my touch.
I knew what to do with it. I was making a terrarium for Harriet. The sight of her crawling over the dog skull proved scintillating, though the dollhouse furniture a niece donated to the cause created an even eerier effect.
On Harriet’s first day in the terrarium, one of my friends reached in to pick her up. She didn’t like the idea. She bent herself up at an oblique angle to show her fangs and the light hair around them. When my friend persisted, she ran around the terrarium, kicking hairs off her abdomen with her hind legs to discourage her tormentor. Soon after he stopped—without having held the tarantula—his forearm broke out in itchy little nodules. I hadn’t been able to see the hairs as she shed them. I’ve since seen pictures of tarantula hairs magnified; each filament looks like a cross between a harpoon and a Christmas tree, and they work their way into the skin, causing horrible discomfort in some people, no effect at all in others. Later, staring at the bald pinkish patch on Harriet’s abdomen, Tracy said, “I take back what I said about the eyes being the grossest part.”
After Harriet had lived in the terrarium for a few days, I sat watching her where she snuggled in a hollow place in the dirt beneath the dog skull. “I wonder if they’re really territorial,” I said to no one in particular. The next thing I knew I had embarked on another of my unscientific experiments, dumping in another tarantula, a stubby-legged, slightly immature female we had captured on the road that rainy night. They both reared up and tangled their legs, fangs stretching open wide enough to accommodate a human thumb. They stumbled over the dog skull in their grappling. They un-clinched and scrambled away to opposite corners of the terrarium, knocking doll tables and chairs over in their haste. In the wild, that would surely have been the end of the fight, but they were cramped together in a cage. I thought of reaching in to take one out, but both were riled, and I was afraid to try.
They met again, seizing, pushing, threatening with fangs. The spectacle was like amateur wrestling with meat cleavers. They separated and retreated. Each felt her w
ay around the terrarium until they met again for a similar skirmish. They didn’t seem to grasp that they were caged; they repeatedly ran away in a panic, only to bump into each other and brawl again. I stayed up well into the night listening to music and watching them fight.
In the morning the stubby-legged female lay dead, her tough carapace bitten through like piecrust. Harriet didn’t seem to have eaten on her: it was a simple killing.
“The females are highly territorial,” I told Tracy.
Snooping under rocks down by the creek, I turned up a meager supply of tarantula food: one small centipede and a dozen pill bugs. I doubted a tarantula would eat such small prey. I tossed the whole batch to Prima. With a precision I didn’t expect, she stabbed her long fangs into the skinny centipede. After she had worked at him awhile, he looked like a bit of knotted thread. She had no interest in the pill bugs; when one bumped into her, she shook her leg like a cat that has stepped into a puddle.
It’s common for a tarantula to pass an entire winter without a morsel, but I didn’t know that. I thought she needed food. I went to a pet store and bought a dozen crickets.
I poured the entire dozen in at once. Prima stood in the center of the jar. She immediately took a cricket, folding his little brown-and-white body double with the force of her bite. His comrades didn’t take any particular interest in his fate. They spread out around the jar, hugging the glass. The pet store must have skimped on the protein: each cricket seized a pill bug, turned it upside down, and began devouring it, using its shell as a bowl and eating the insides. The pill bug (also known as a wood louse or a roly-poly) is a crustacean; maybe crickets prize them as much as we do lobster.
Prima stood in the center of the ring of carnivorous crickets, chewing her cricket slowly. She looked like the queen of some little pocket of hell.