Spiders are frequently maligned as vicious and frightening, but Rosemary is here to settle the score.
Well, another summer gone and my hopes that pop culture will enhance our understanding of nature have been dashed, yet again. For example: Did The Dark Knight teach anyone anything useful about bats? Not that I could tell. And after three blockbuster movies about Spiderman, you’d think everyone would be totally cool with arachnids by now. But no.
I’m joking (kind of) but boy! Spiders, real spiders, definitely need someone to put a good spin on their contributions to the world. Seriously, without these real-life web-slingers, it’s quite likely that our planet would be defoliated, our crops decimated, and our livestock diseased. That’s according to Seattle spider specialist Rod Crawford, who claims that these eight-legged predators are more important to “the proper functioning of our planet than we are.” That’s because without spiders constantly catching and eating them, insects would devour just about everything.
Insects would devour just about everything without spiders constantly catching and eating them. (Courtesy Julia Freeman-Woolpert)
Insects. That’s what 99.9% of spiders eat. Besides making more of themselves, that’s pretty much the whole point of a spider’s being. Yet many people treat them like evil personified, which is really misguided. Only rarely will spiders bite people and then, only in self-defense.
What about the brown recluse, you may be asking? Well, first off, they are not normally found in New England; they are native to the southern US. And recent studies have shown that doctors often misdiagnose odd bug bites and infections as coming from the brown recluse spider. No one has ever died from this kind of spider bite, yet the urban hysteria lives on.
Simply put, spiders are not villains. In fact, once you get to know them, you’ll discover they really are just like superheroes — only smaller and without the secret identities.
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