Spider Talk

Two spiders were talking. They happen to like each other because both have two of the most difficult names in their species. One was Pholcus phalangioides, known as the long-bodied cellar spider or the skull spider and the other was Argiope trifasciata. Argiopeis Latin for “with bright face”; trifasciata is Latin for “three-banded.”

These two have this air of superiority over other spiders although one species has a more complex name than either; however, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, is also known as the common house spider, casting an inky shadow to the aura of the complicated name. But Pholcus phalangioides is one to talk when he is a cellar dweller. He’s got something special though as I shall explain.

They get together once a week. The following is the actual, unabridged transcript of their recent conversation.

Pholcus phalangioides: You heard what our human hosts were talking about the other day?

Argiope trifasciata: They’re your hosts, not mine, because you live in their cellar.  I am a free ranger. My meals are exotic as they come.  You prey on baby cockroaches.  Anyway, what have they got to say - your hosts?

Pholcus phalangioides: I heard them talking while working on a “project” at the basement. The so called “project” is a little bit of this, a little of that but mostly twisting off beer caps are what you’d hear in between the whirring of a power drill and some hammer work. In my experience watching professionals, a power drill and a hammer don’t go together well in assembling projects.

Argiope trifasciata: Please go on already. This is not one of your conspiracy stuff, is it?

Pholcus phalangioides: Listen. Steve was telling Al that he read something about some recent discovery by astrophysicists or cosmologists, those types, of a disturbance created from somewhere about 130 million light years away. And I said to myself, big deal!

Argiope trifasciata: What was it? Should it concern us?

Pholcus phalangioides: They talked about an event from trillions and trillions of miles away but it took 130 million years for the effect to get here. Our ancestors, yours and mine, were here 380 million years before these humans knew how to make crude tools. And this so called discovery is like a big deal when I could have confirmed its existence to them without resorting to their sophisticated detection tools”.

Argiope trifasciata: I think I know what you’re talking about, but do go on”.

Pholcus phalangioides: First of all, they talk about this detector that costs $1.1 billion each and they built two of those at different locations just to make sure they got it right. It’s called LIGO, by the way.

Argiope trifasciata: What does LIGO stand for?

Pholcus phalangioides: I’ll tell you but you won’t remember it the second I say it. Steve and Al don’t either, so don’t feel bad.  It’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.  It will detect gravity waves that disturb space time.

Argiope trifasciata: Wait, wait! You and I know we don’t call it that but we know what it is because we feel it every time it comes across but how do you know what this thing really is. Your human friends Steve and Al don’t sound that sophisticated to me. By the way, I don’t care what it’s called. I don’t mind that hairs on our legs – in all eight of them – feel it but what bothers me is when I feel the effect right at our foreheads and it’s not helping that our eight eyes are right there. It bothers me every time. My question is, ‘Why didn’t evolution take care of it already’? For millions of years it took to get us to our sophisticated level today …”

Pholcus phalangioides: Listen and listen well, they’re not our human friends the way they treat us.  We should be their friends, or at least they should recognize we’re useful to them. What we get in return is we’ve become Halloween caricatures and you’ve seen or hear how they squeal and scream when they come near us. I’ve seen enough cruelty and torment from their brooms and folded newspapers.  Sometimes they use fly swatters on so many of us. I just cringe every time I think about it. Don’t get me going, okay?  Anyway, I read, that’s how I know”.

Argiope trifasciata: Sorry.  So they have a name for it. They’ve detected it with some pretty expensive detectors, big deal! I’ll have to agree with you there.

Pholcus phalangioides: Decades ago someone named Albert Einstein predicted the existence of this thing.  Like I said earlier, I could have confirmed it.  My great, great, great grandfather or perhaps much earlier from my ancestry, could have told them that it is true. Anyway, we knew it existed but I’ll have to give it to these humans to explain why and how it is produced. Nevertheless, what good is detecting something that happened at a time when there were still dinosaurs around? Speaking of dinosaurs, what was so special about them? They died out and we’re still here and we’ll be here long after many more species will have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Argiope trifasciata: Okay, okay, you’re going somewhere again, like you usually do. Let’s get back to what we’ve been talking about. We’re so sophisticated we can detect the slightest movement anywhere our web is touched. We can tell too if it is prey, something we can eat, or if it is just a leaf or twig or even a gust of wind or even from a slight breeze. Millions of years of evolution gave us eight simple eyes, eight legs with some exceptions, our mutant relatives they are. And …

Pholcus phalangioides: You’re talking to me, another spider. I know that, we know that. What humans don’t know is that we’ve been able to detect these so called gravity waves all our lives. They don’t know that and they can’t know it because they can’t measure it in us.  Anyway, do you want to know what these gravity waves are?

Argiope trifasciata: Even if I say no, you’re going to tell me anyway.  So tell me.

Pholcus phalangioides: At least you’ll know what this thing that from time to time bothers us. I know it’s irritating, something humans have no idea how. We’re more sensitive to it than their $1.1 billion detector. Apparently, these gravity waves that had been bothering us for all this time occurs from trillions and trillions of miles from here, like I said. This particular one came from a place that took light 130 million years to get here.  So, two heavy stars that much earlier had already collapsed into their dense shells collided and merged into one. There was an explosion as you can imagine and the event caused a ripple through space time around them, producing waves that travelled just like something produced when a pebble is dropped on a still pond.  It was so far away and by the time it got here the strength is a feeble facsimile of the original. We felt a lot of these in the past. Humans finally felt it and that was all the excitement about. Well, what do you think?

Argiope trifasciata: To be honest, I don’t really care. Good talk though. I need to relocate my web. There’s a new spot that seems to get a lot of traffic – flies, mosquitoes, moths, you name it.

Pholcus phalangioides: Before you go, let me tell you something.  Be thankful you can detect everything that touches your web. These gravity waves don’t come across that frequently. And by the way, baby cockroaches taste better than adult mosquitoes you’ve been getting lately. You know they carry more diseases than baby roaches. Baby insects until they’ve become adults are much cleaner, and easier to catch, of course. And don’t forget you are an arachnid. People fear you.  Same place next week? Happy Halloween!!!

Nerd Notes (Or, a note to the nerds among you):

Largely unnoticed last week or so ago was the much awaited news that astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists had been waiting for.  It was the rock-solid evidence of the existence of so called gravity waves, one among several of Einstein’s predictions proven to be true. Contrary to our two spiders’ pooh-poohing attitude, this was a big deal. It proved again that space that we know to be empty can be stretched and compressed and rippled like still water in a pond. It is so counter intuitive bordering on the strange and the bizarre, yet so very real.

Science News in Astronomy: “On February 11, 2016, after decades of trying to directly detect such waves, scientists announced that they appear to have found them. The waves came from another galaxy far, far away. How far? Try between 750 million and 1.86 billion light-years away! There, two black holes collided, shaking the fabric of space and time, or spacetime. Here on Earth, two giant detectors in different parts of the United States quivered as gravity waves washed over them”.

Not only did LIGO confirm it, radio and optical telescopes located the spot in the sky where the ripple started.

What about our two spiders detecting the waves? We cannot prove that they do or don’t.  And I am under no obligation to reveal how I came across the transcript of their conversation.