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Lucy Cooke: Seductions a vulnerable game by anybody's standards. You sort of lay yourself down on the line and really hope you're not gonna get rejected. If you're a spider, rejection has a rather grizzly face. It's not just your ego that's gonna get dented. You may lose several legs, if not your entire life, in the process. I had a lot of sympathy for these males.[00:01:00]

Rosie: Autumn's here, and as the long days creep shorter and the balmy nights regain their frosty edges, we are not the only ones looking to curl up somewhere warm. This is a time of year for spiders and their increased activity is driven by the need for something vitally important. Sex spider mating is completely unlike any other animal.

And at first glance, it might reinforce the idea that spiders are vicious, creepy, and should be avoided. But as we take a deeper look, can spiders actually give us a completely different view of sex, death, and evolution itself? I'm Ranger Rosie Holdsworth. Welcome to Wild Tales, sex, death, and Spiders.[00:02:00]

Anna: There's always the imposter syndrome at the back of the head, but I think I would like to call myself an ologist. I've been working with spiders for a few years now, so I think I can, I can claim, I can claim the title geneticist and arachnologist

Rosie: This is Anna Maka a finder of spiders. Anna's work primarily is searching for rare spiders, like the dinner plate sized fen raft.

But today we are searching somewhere a little

Anna: closer to home, and we are at my house today in my shared accommodation. It's nice, it's cheap and we will be looking for some spiders today. That's what I do every day. I look for spiders and maybe give them a name like Rob or or Bob or Dave

Rosie: or in my house we like to call them Clive.

There's a few species of spider you'll probably see in your house at this time of year from the [00:03:00] big brown giant house spiders. That's Clive to tiny striped zebra jumping spiders.

Anna: I quite enjoy the cellar spiders, the ones with the really long, lanky legs. They're just really goofy. As soon as they leave the web, they're kind of, they look a bit drunk and they've really struggled to walk around and kind of like, you know, fall all over the place and like trip and can't climb anything.

I think first we will open the cupboard under the stairs, the Harry Potter cupboard, and have a little shine of a torch in there and see if there's anyone hiding in there. Yeah, I'll open the Harry Potter cupboard first with my, with my torch, with my professional phone torch. Let's see if there's.

Anything. There's some webs, but nothing hanging out there. Oh, look at that. Here's a nice cellar spider. So at the moment you might be able to find more spiders at [00:04:00] home because the breeding season is coming to a close. So a lot of spiders have been breeding. So with the last bit of heat, a lot of spiders will reproduce.

They'll make the egg sacks, and then when spring comes around, they'll hatch once. The time is right and the weather is right, and the temperature is right. There is environmental factors that will trigger the male spiders to start looking for the females.

Rosie: The females will release pheromones that make the tiny hair-like receptors all over the male's body start to quiver.

Anna: They're being summoned. That's why you see them running around your floor, around your house. So actively looking for those females that are usually hunkered down and hidden somewhere in the corner of your house. They have to go in this grand adventure to go and find a girlfriend.

Rosie: But what happens when you get there and your unrequited lover is 25 times your size?

Lucy Cooke: [00:05:00] It is fantastically kinky.

They are outrageous spiders.

Rosie: This is Lucy Cooke, a zoologist, presenter, and author of the book, bitch on the Female of the Species.

Lucy Cooke: When it comes to spiders, females are the dominant aggressive sex. They're often much bigger than the male. A golden orb weave of spider. The female is 125 times heavier than the male. It's the females that are the, the incredible hunters.

Male spiders are. To be honest, and I'm sorry about this guys, they're little more than walking sacks or sperm. They don't have fangs, they don't have venom. They don't have the ability, the wherewithal to build a web. They can't even hunt some of them. Their only point in life. Is to find a female and mate, and this is where you have this sort of fantastic battle of the sexes that exists with arachnids.

The females, she, she wants to [00:06:00] mate too, but she's on a different timeline to the males before she mates. She wants to get really fat and so she's in really good condition to lay loads of really healthy eggs. You know, some female spiders can live for 30 years. They're not looking to get their rocks off straight away.

So here you have the first problem, which is that males wanna mate and females maybe don't wanna mate. They might wanna eat more than they wanna mate. And the really fascinating thing about spiders is one of the hardest things for males is to get the attention of the female. So that's how it gets kinky, is there's all sorts of tactics that males have evolved to thwart their lover's, predatory instincts.

Rosie: A lot of these tactics vary from species to species as the size, differentiation and aggression of female spiders varies, but all spiders have figured out a way to love [00:07:00] a arm's length.

Anna: So with spiders, the male will lay down a sperm web on the ground somewhere, and then what he will do is he has petty pals. So the little kind of. Arms that you see that aren't quite as long as the legs he uses as sort of, um, two penises. I dunno if I, am I allowed to say that? So he initially deposits the sperm on their web and then picks it up, carries it around, and then he will insert those petty pulps into the female, into her epigene.

The shape of the epigene corresponds to the shape of the petty palp of the male, so each species will have a specific shape of an epigene and a specific shape of a pet pal for the female and the male, and it has to. It has to fit in just right.[00:08:00]

Rosie: So the male spider is carrying his little sperm web ready to try and insert his pet pulps into the female spider. But how to get close enough.

Lucy Cooke: So in some species, males resort to a little light bondage. They will use silk and threads to, to tie the female up so that she's disabled and can't attack him while he's, um.

Getting busy with his petty pals. You can sort of see this deathly game of it carrying on in your own home with males desperately trying to mate with these enormous predatory females.

Rosie: This match of David and Goliath is happening all around us. In every home or today in Anna's house. Yeah. Let's go find another spider.

Anna: Let's, let's check out the kitchen. Sometimes there's, there's something, oh, there's a little guy. Hold on. You know what I'm gonna.

Ah, climb. Climb onto the [00:09:00] kitchen counter just so I can give you a correct identification of this guy. Oh, this is a, oh, hello. It's running around. It's a baby false widow. So see. Actually how it's running around right now, it can feel the vibration of my voice on the web sometimes. That's how sensitive it can be to vibrations that it can hear me speaking and it feels like there's something trapped in its web just because the, the proximity of my voice to the web, my voice alone is making it vibrate enough.

That it thinks there's food there. Isn't that fascinating? And there's also a little, little exoskeleton there as well. So it has grown recently. So we have a little baby false widow in the ceiling.

Lucy Cooke: When you look closely at a spider's web, you're gonna see the female very obviously in the middle. It's always worth having a little look for males as well and 'cause they are just teeny tiny specks of, of [00:10:00] spider at the edge of the web, just sort of looking cautiously across at their paramor to see whether it's safe to approach.

Anna: The web is, is connected in a way that wherever the spider is going to be, it will feel the vibration of each strand of the web. They rely on the web, they are constantly on the web. Each of the legs will be hooked, uh, with little tiny tona. Have two little tiny toenails at the end of the feet. It's really cute.

I do recommend you look up spider feet or tarantula feet. You'll not be disappointed. Looks like little kittens. And they will hook those tiny little nails onto the, onto the web and then any kind of vibration, they will be able to feel any traction of the web against their feet so they can. It's, it's fascinating really, it's, it's hard to explain.

A sense that you've never experienced before. [00:11:00] It's like, you know, how do you explain to a spider how it is to smell things?

Rosie: Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and imagine you have spun yourself one of nature's greatest communication methods. You sit in the center of your creation. All that matters is the threads that anchor you to the rest of the world.

Suddenly you start to feel a tingle, a vibration. The line goes au. Something is caught trapped between your eyes and ears. It tries to move and you feel its shift to the right, but it's entangled. You strike and munch a snack, or was it

Lucy Cooke: when you are a male spider, that that's a pretty precarious place to be because if you are 125 times smaller than the female in question then.

You kind of look remarkably like dinner to her.

Anna: Most spiders have [00:12:00] cannibalism tendencies, especially when it comes to mating.

So the females may accept a male and may mate with him, but then she might as well decide that she's hungry and that she needs extra sustenance for her babies, for her growing babies. So what's the, the easier option in that moment is, you know, take a snack on the boyfriend. So the females tend to overpower the males quite easily, size and strength wise and yeah, so that, that happens pretty often.

And across all species of spiders, not just a f rough spider. The false widow will do it too. Sometimes they will even eat other spiders when they're just hungry and another spider comes across the web, actually sell spiders are. Specialize in eating of spiders because of their long lanky legs, they're able to pull themselves close to another spider [00:13:00] and bite it and then pull away really quickly so that of a spider doesn't attack it, and then wait for the spider to become, um, paralyzed and then they go for it and eat it.

So they're really good at that. They're really good. If you don't like spiders, sellar spiders are good to keep around because they'll eat all the spiders.

Rosie: The cellar spiders are clearly eaten all the spiders inside. So we headed to the garden to see what else we could find.

Anna: Okay, so here we are in the garden actually, the weather that's quite nice out. So what immediately pops out to me is the window sill. The window sill usually has some nice crevices and cracks, especially when you live in a old student house like I do, where things haven't been patched up in a while. This is, um, if you, if you look at it from this angle, see the [00:14:00] orb web just there, so this one, it could either be the garden cross orb weaver, or it could be the missing sector Orb Weaver and I suspect is the missing sector orb weaver, because the whole orb web is very nice and very neat.

And then here you get one thicker line that will probably lead to the retreat and then a missing sector. The name missing sector, orb Weaver comes from that? Not always, but usually when they build the orb web, they will not build one sector of it or one section. So I suspect that's a missing sector. Orb weaver, which is another common garden spider or come in spider that you find pretty much anywhere inside, outside, especially around human homes, they are those one of those spiders that you'll definitely find.

Rosie: Another spider you might find in your garden is the nursery web spider, the Romeo of the arachnids, [00:15:00] who takes a gentler approach to trying to woo his lover

Anna: The nursery web spiders, the males will often bring females what's called an noctual gift. What they do is they catch a bug and they wrap it up in some web and then they bring it to the female for consideration and she'll either accept a gift or reject a gift, and the purpose of the gift is to kind of distract her so that she won't eat him.

The idea is if she's occupied with eating something, I can go for it. And you know, mate, with her, this is. A male nursery spider, POV, I can give her a gift, she'll be eating, she'll be distracted. So I can go in and mate with her and she won't even notice. And sometimes, actually, sometimes the males that can't be bothered to hunt for an actual bug to wrap up in web, they'll try and trick the females and they'll just grab a bit of a leaf.

You know, wrap it up in some web and just gift the female a leaf in hopes that she won't notice [00:16:00] that there's no food in there. And then they'll go for it. And sometimes it works, sometimes it works.

Rosie: Different species of male spiders have different ways to charm or trick their giant lovers. Some like the wolf spider will work in pears conducting a threesome to bolster their chances.

For others like Darwin's Bark Spider, they rely on oral stimulation to keep the female spider calm for copulation. But peacock spiders are perhaps the most charming conducting a literal dance with death.

Waving their tiny arms, drumming a beat with their feet and jumping tiny steps closer to make sure he is read the room just right.

Lucy Cooke: So it's not just a question of being the biggest or the most aggressive or, or even the most flamboyant. There's a dialogue. Males have to listen to females or they, or uh, uh, you know, whether they're spiders or humans.

It's just that. If you mess up and you are a spider male and you don't listen to [00:17:00] the female, you're gonna get eaten as opposed to just rejected.

Rosie: For many years, Lucy had had little interest in spiders, but there was something about them that had reeled her in.

Lucy Cooke: I think the spiders are a really great lesson in. Keeping your eyes open and your mind open too to things, to other explanations, and not just the ones that are written in the textbooks.

Rosie: As a student of zoology in a wood paneled seminar room in Oxford, Lucy had been told

Lucy Cooke: that as a female I was essentially an evolutionary loser because it was the males that that were the dominant drivers of evolutionary change.

They were the ones that were the competitive aggressive. Dominant ones and and the ones that were worth studying, whereas females were basically just low little brown jobs that all just weren't really worth bothering with. I remember feeling uneasy and uncomfortable [00:18:00] and saddened by this information, but also feeling like I couldn't see my reflection in the animal kingdom.

If that was the case, thinking, well, I wonder how we explain me then.

Rosie: This view on the female of the species began with one of the most extraordinary scientists toward the earth, Darwin. Darwin's Paradigm is one of sexual selection. It's something that's bled into every element of our culture from reality.

Dating shows to the highest levels of academia.

Lucy Cooke: This idea that because males produce lots of sperm and females produce, uh, a finite number of energetically expensive eggs, that then. Dictates sex roles from there on in that females will be destined to always be choosy and chaste. And males are destined to be competitive and promiscuous.

Darwin was a brilliant scientist, there's no doubt about it. Very meticulous and and thorough, which is why it's so astonishing that [00:19:00] he was blindsided by the culture of the time. We all view the world through the prism of our own existence, and that's unique to every single one of us. When he came to describe the sexes, the female of the species came out in the shape of Victorian housewife.

She was passive, coy and submissive because that was that. That was how Victorian society saw females.

Rosie: But how did this scientific grate so interested in the natural world come to be entangled by human society? And why has it taken nearly 200 years to add nuance and gargantuan females to sexual selection?

Lucy Cooke: And because Darwin. Said that it meant that all the scientists that followed in his wake for over a hundred years suffered from a chronic case of confirmation bias or just ignored females. You know that that's the problem with paradigms is that they force us to look at the world in a [00:20:00] certain way and they are useful.

But it, I think the spider is a great example of, of something that that doesn't fit that paradigm and then opens up the world to be so much more wondrous.

Rosie: And even for the great Darwin, it was spiders who held the key, the species that could have prevented these sweeping assumptions about the female of the species.

Lucy Cooke: He even writes about spiders in the descent of man. He'd seen this female, this gargantuan female consuming the diminutive male and describes the in indignation that he feels watching this because it perverts the natural order, which is that males are bigger and males are aggressive and dominant, not female.

And what it would seem is, is that it's an awful lot more complicated than that. We know that looking at our own species, we can see that, but it's just taken evolutionary biology, a a, a long time to [00:21:00] sort of catch up with the logic that's all around us. And nowhere is this more evidence that females can be just as dominant and aggressive and promiscuous as males than amongst arachnids.

I am sure that the fact that spider females pervert the Victorian stereotypes of sex and gender so fantastically has done nothing to help their reputation of being creepy and weird and and abhorrent, but to me, it just makes them all the more glorious.

Rosie: That unconscious bias has rippled through our culture, changed our views on all animals, all people, but it's not an obstacle that's impossible to overcome. Maybe we can start at home.[00:22:00]

Anna: So I started with a little green spider in my garden. I was quite scared of spiders back then. I didn't really fancy them too much. I didn't really like when they were in my room, I would have to get them out before I went to sleep. And then there's that kind of learnt conditioned fear of them that that is passed down.

Generations. For me, it was my mom that was really scared of spiders, but it was this tiny green spider and I had found in my garden and I was like, wow, it's so cute and small and green. It was this green crab spider and I compared the photos and Google images, two photos of that that I've taken of the green spider in my garden and I found out what it was and I was like, wow, so cool.

I've learned that even though some things may seem quite scary. Sometimes it's just that they appear that way and they're not actually scary.

Rosie: Spiders are a constant reminder that all is not what it seems. [00:23:00] That nature is not interested in our biases. They're an invitation to lean in and look a little closer.

Back at Anna's, our search for spiders draws to a close, but the gladiator game of sex and death continues each year. Perhaps we can learn something from the Clives under the sofa.

Anna: One of my favorite things about spiders, the females, they live the longest. They're the biggest. They make the decisions.

They're the, you know, they're the boss. Yeah. So that's, that's one of the things that I do. Really, I would like about spiders for sure.

Lucy Cooke: E, every time I see a spider's web now, I'll always really go in for a close look to see the female and almost kind of like salute her and be like, yeah, sister, you are really, you, you, you are a, you're a badass.[00:24:00]

Rosie: Thanks for joining me in this wild tale. Do you have an amazing story about the natural world? I'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Instagram at @wildtalesnt, or email podcasts@nationaltrust.org.uk to send us pictures and stories of the wildness around you. Make sure you get every episode by following wild tales on your favorite podcast app.

Even better, leave us a review or comment on an episode. I'd love to hear what you think. Did you know we also do video podcasts? They can be found on our YouTube channel or on Spotify. While you're there, why not check out our history? Show back when of smaller Ears Range, Ray and the Wildlifes. See you next time.

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