This Is Why Everything About Spiders Is Creepy, Weird, and Completely Unhinged
Spiders are 400 million years old — older than trees, older than flowers, older than anything we'd recognize as nature. And yet most people know almost nothing about them.
In this video, we go deep. From the origin of venom (it didn't evolve to kill — it evolved to dissolve) to the silk that engineers still can't replicate, to hydraulic legs that work without extensor muscles, to the question researchers are only starting to take seriously: are spiders, in some strange and distributed way, smarter than we think?
We cover the Sydney funnel-web spider — whose venom can kill a human but leaves dogs and cats completely unharmed. The Darwin's bark spider of Madagascar, which builds webs spanning 80 feet across flowing rivers using silk ten times tougher than Kevlar. The golden silk orb-weaver, whose threads literally glow gold in sunlight. The bolus spider, which chemically mimics female moth pheromones and fishes for males with a sticky lasso. The trapdoor spider, which strikes and vanishes underground in 15 milliseconds. The water spider, which builds an underwater air chamber out of silk and lives below the surface. And Portia — a jumping spider the size of your thumbnail that performs reconnaissance, plans detours, and hunts prey larger than itself with what researchers are calling primate-like spatial reasoning.
Oh, and peacock spiders. Barely a fifth of an inch long. The males put on a full choreographed UV light show just to avoid being eaten by the female they're trying to impress. If that fails, she eats them anyway.
This is 30 minutes on one of Earth's most successful, most bizarre, and most underestimated predators. By the end of this, you will not look at one the same way again.