Weaving my way through the web of spin

THERE’S no doubt the internet is a wonderful thing, particularly for somebody like me who spends hours every day trying to track down obscure bits of information.

However, I was researching something about spiders recently and the internet took me down a long trail that illustrated some of its dangers. It started in an arachnaphobic chat room where people were freaking out about a new spider species that had been discovered which was six feet in diameter and ‘faster than you can imagine’. There was even a picture of an evil-looking white creature. This was suspicious. It got even more suspicious as I read on and it turned out this remarkable creature had been found on the sea bed deep off the coast of Antarctica.

There are no spiders in the sea. They can’t breathe under water. As I surfed a bit further, I found that this newly discovered creature actually did exist — only it was much smaller, much slower and not a spider. It was in fact a species of pycnogonid.

The exact classification of these unpronounceable creatures is argued about amongst the experts. Their common English name is ‘sea spider’, which was enough to cause panic among a group of people who shared the world’s commonest phobia. To avoid confusion, sea slugs aren’t slugs either.

That piece of misinformation was the result of a genuine, and perhaps understandable, mistake. But I dug a bit further and found something more deliberate and possibly more sinister. A whole bestiary of fabulous, fictional creatures — all presented on serious-looking websites with titles like ‘Facts about Spiders’.

There was the wind-current spider which a website claimed lived permanently in the stratosphere, was a cannibal and had some mysterious capacity to extract energy from. Like all good lies, it contains an element of truth.

Many spider species, including several Irish ones, when they’re young prospect for new territories by extruding a rope of gossamer and ‘kiting’ on the wind. There is scientific evidence they sometimes get sucked up by thermals, ascend to great altitudes, travel great distances and survive the experience. But that’s not quite the same as a species that lives its entire life-cycle in the stratosphere.

Some spiders were less credible. The Kenyan apple-crosser spider is said to grow real emeralds on its abdomen; the orange magma spider can survive temperatures of 5,300 degrees Fahrenheit though, surprisingly, it is only found at the foot of the largest glacier in Antarctica; the enormous sea-wheel spider evolved in the 1800s to emulate the spiked ship’s wheels on British sailing frigates.

Somebody out there is using their imagination. And I suspect he, she or they, live in America — there are no metric measures used. That’s fine, it’s a free world. But I can tell the truth from the fiction quite easily because I’ve a background knowledge of zoology. Many of these ‘educational’ websites are very plausible and seem to be aimed at young people. Am I just being an old fogey or is this sort of misinformation really quite dangerous?

I’ll leave you with one more gem — the holy spiders of China. This website claims that all spiders are immortal, they never die of natural causes, and that there’s a group of them in China that hatched 2,800 years ago during the Mang-Tsung dynasty and have been cared for ever since by an order of monks. Just about plausible enough to fool the gullible and the ignorant.

* [e-mail]