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CRAZY CREEPY CRAWLERS Deadly Spiders by Matt Turner Illustrated by Santiago Calle

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CRAZY CREEPY CRAWLERS Deadly Spiders by Matt Turner Illustrated by Santiago Calle CRAZY CREEPY CRAWLERS Deadly Spiders By Matt Turner Illustrated by Santiago Calle Oh, what big eyes you have! THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK CRAZY CREEPY CRAWLERS deadly Spiders anks to the creative team: Senior Editor: Alice Peebles Fact Checking: Kate Mitchell Designer: www.collaborate.agency Original edition copyright 2016 by Hungry Tomato Ltd. Copyright © 2017 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc. Hungry Tomato™ is a trademark of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief deadly Spiders quotations in an acknowledged review. Hungry Tomato™ A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc. 241 First Avenue North Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com. Main body text set in Adobe Devanagari Regular 12/13. Typeface provided by Adobe Systems. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Turner, Matt, 1964– , author. Title: Deadly spiders / Matt Turner. Description: Minneapolis : Hungry Tomato, 2017. | Includes index. | Audience: Ages 8 to 12. | Audience: Grades 4 to 6. Identi ers: LCCN 2016023370 (print) | LCCN 2016034753 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512415537 (lb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781512430806 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781512427134 (eb pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Spiders—Juvenile literature. | Poisonous spiders— Juvenile literature. Classi cation: LCC QL458.4 .T87 2017 (print) | LCC QL458.4 (ebook) | DDC 595.4/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023370 Manufactured in the United States of America 1-39913-21383-7/21/2016 CRAZY CREEPY CRAWLERS deadly Spiders by Matt Turner Illustrated by Santiago Calle CONTENTS Deadly Spiders 6 Silk & Orb Webs 8 Tunnels & Trapdoors 10 Venom & Hunting 12 rowing & Spitting 14 Fishing 16 Camou age 18 Mimicry 20 Reproduction 22 Spiders & People 24 Spiders & eir Enemies 26 e Other Arachnids 28 Six Spider Facts 30 Glossary 31 Index 32 DEADLY SPIDERS For many of us, spiders are fearsome creatures. But theyre also fascinating. Theyve lived on Earth for more than 300 million years and have evolved to live in almost every dryland habitat, from deep caves to deserts to rain forests. Many seem quite at home in our houses too. There are more than fifty thousand species of all shapes and sizes, found worldwide except Antarctica. A spider’s body has two main parts: the cephalothorax (supporting the Leg IV Spiders are not related to eyes, mouthparts, and legs), and insects. They have eight (not the abdomen (containing most of Spinners six) legs, their body is in two the internal organs). (not three) parts, and they Leg III dont have antennae. Like insects, however, spiders are arthropods. They have an exoskeleton (outer armor) that must be molted regularly Eyes Abdomen as the young spider grows Femur to adulthood. (You can Leg II Patella sometimes find the empty Tibia molts in their webs.) All spiders make silk, a strong Cephalothorax thread that is spun from the Chelicera Metatarsus spinnerets—tiny nozzles at Palp the tip of the abdomen. Most Leg I Tarsus spider species have eight eyes, but some have six, four, or There are four Claw even just two. pairs of legs, numbered I to IV (front to back). 6 Spiders are predators. Some catch their prey in webs, some ambush it, and still others chase it. Spiders cant eat solid food, so most spiders use venom (poison) to kill or paralyze their prey and turn its insides into a kind of gut soup. In some species, the venom is so strong it can harm or even kill humans, but the majority of spiders cannot hurt us. They even help us by killing pests. Its been estimated that the prey eaten each year by all spiders weighs more than the entire human race. SILK & ORB WEBS Like you, I keep my comb handy. Wheeeeeee! Cribellum Some spiders have a cribellum—a rack of extra Silk is stretchy and strong, and spiders often spin a spinnerets—that spins a fine silk that is then combed “dragline” to catch their fall when they leap or drop by the legs to make “woolly” silk for snaring prey. from a perch such as a twig. I’m not quite A real finished yet! team effort! Silk is so strong that native peoples in New Guinea A textile artist in Madagascar collected gold- once wove it over wooden hoops to make nets for colored silk from more than one million orb fishing in rivers. weavers to make a beautiful cape. Cool, there’s my runway marked out! I’m coming in to land. Stabilimenta are silken zigzags that some spiders weave into their webs. Do these eye-catching designs help attract insect prey by reflecting ultraviolet light, or do they keep birds away by making the web more visible? Do they help to make the spider look bigger? Experts aren’t quite sure. 8 MAKING SILK Stored as a liquid, spider silk dries into a thread after being squeezed out of a spiders spinnerets. Spiders can spin different kinds of silk: sticky for trapping prey, non-sticky for walking on, extra- GOLDEN ORB WEB SPIDER strong for hanging from, and so on. Their most FAMILY NEPHILIDAE famous creation is the beautiful, spiraling orb Body size: female up to 2 inches web, but many spiders build more messy-looking, (50 millimeters) three-dimensional tangle webs. male 0.2–0.3 inches (5–8 mm) Where found: North, Central, and South America STRONG STUFF Spider silk is five times stronger than steel of the same thickness. One day, spider silk may be used to make bullet-proof vests for soldiers. GARDEN SPIDERS A garden spider may use up to 197 feet (60 meters) of silk in a typical orb web but can usually finish the task within an hour. THE OTHER ARACHNIDS Anything that runs around on eight legs like the spiders is classified as an arachnid. There are more than one hundred thousand named species in the class Arachnida, including ticks, mites, harvestmen, scorpions, solifuges, and whip scorpions. As a group, they are found all over the world, even in the oceans—and if you look closely, you can see some of them in your own backyard Ticks are parasites, living on the skin of a host (such as you or your dog). Some are tiny, and the biggest are nearly 1 inch (2.5 cm) long. To find a host, many ticks wait with their legs outstretched at the tip of a stem of grass. If you brush past them, they jump on. Then they bite into the skin and suck blood, swelling up as they do so. After feeding, they drop off and lay eggs in the ground. Mites are found in every imaginable land habitat. Worldwide there are more than fifty thousand species, feeding on dead plants, dead skin and hair, fresh blood . yuck Most are too small to see—which is a good thing because there could be hundreds of dust mites in your bed right now. They might make you asthmatic or itchy, but otherwise theyre harmless. Harvestmen look a bit like spindly- legged spiders, but, unlike a spider, the two body sections are fused into one. Also, they have just one pair of eyes. They eat almost anything, from dung to plant material to animals, alive or dead—unlike spiders, they can digest solid food. You might see a harvestman in a sand dune or open field, walking jerkily on its thin legs. 28 Scorpions are found worldwide, and there are around 1,750 species. Most spend the day under a rock and hunt at night. They use their sharp claws to tear food apart. All use venom for catching prey such as insects or mice as well as for defence. The venom is injected from the telson, the final tail segment, which can be arched over during attack. Only about twenty-five species can kill a human. Solifuges, also known as camel spiders, sun spiders, or wind scorpions, live in dry parts of the world. They hunt anything from beetles to lizards to rodents. Typically they have long, pointed jaws (which can make a chattering sound), and very long palps that resemble a fifth pair of legs. At up to 6 inches (15 cm) long, solifuges look alarming, but pose little threat to humans. Hello, eight- legged friends! Whip scorpions include two groups. Amblypygids (above) live in warm places. They have a flattish body and eight long legs, although the first pair are used as antennae, not for walking. Vinegaroons look a bit like scorpions, but with a whip-like tail. When disturbed, they can spray a sharp-smelling chemical, hence their name. 29 SIX SPIDER FACTS The female desert spider Stegodyphus lineatus rears One of the most venomous North just one group of spiderlings in her life and literally American spiders is the brown recluse or dies for her babies. Her digestive juices soften the food fiddleback, named after the violin-shaped in her stomach, which she then vomits up. Once the markings on its abdomen. Its bite can kill spiderlings have eaten that, they devour their mother, young children, but luckily the spider is leaving just a dry, empty husk. Then they leave the nest. shy and attacks only reluctantly. The six-eyed sand spider Sicarius Really big mygalomorph spiders can kill hahnii, which lives in desert regions and eat snakes—even 18-inch-long of South Africa, can go twelve months (45 cm) rattlesnakes.
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