Criminal - This Is Love

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

Some spiders eat their young, and some eat their parents … love is never simple. From the makers of the award-winning podcast Criminal, This is Love investigates life’s most persistent mystery. Stories of sacrifice, obsession, and the ways in which we bet everything on one another. Listen to other episodes of This is Love at https://thisislovepodcast.com/. If you haven't already, please follow the show and review us on iTunes! https://apple.co/2BmMZr5 Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And generally speaking, they lay about 50 to 100 eggs, and these are laid in a white silken sack. And after the babies hatch, the mother just about immediately lays another set of eggs. And these are what are known as trophic eggs. These are eggs that are never going to hatch, and they will serve as food for the spiralings. This is Dr. Bill Shutt, a professor of biology at Long Island University and a research associate in residence at the American Museum of Natural History.

He's telling us about the black lace weaver spider. It's common in the United States. You've probably seen one before. You probably have one somewhere in your yard right now. They're hard to describe because they look like a spider. They're about half an inch, brownish-black in color, no unusual markings, no beautiful webs. So when the spiderlings hatch, they immediately set about eating the eggs, the trophic eggs that their mother has laid.

Now, spiders and a lot of other arthropods, animals that have an outer covering, they have their skeletons on the outside of their bodies, like shrimp or lobster or scorpions or insects. The only way that they can grow in size is to shed their outer, is to molt this cuticle. So after their first molt, they're pretty much out of food. So they have gone through the trophic eggs that their mother has produced. And that's when they do something really kind of strange. The mother basically thrums on the web, drawing the babies to her. So it's like she drums on the web a bit.

And they are attracted to that vibration of the web. And they swarm all to her. So it's like she drums on the web a bit, and they are attracted to that vibration of the web, and they swarm all over her. Spiders are all about vibration, and so what she basically does is she's plucking on her silk and attracting the youngsters to come to her. This is Dr. Linda Rayor. She's a senior lecturer and senior research associate at Cornell. And her specialty is the social lives of spiders. They respond to the movements

and move in toward her as a group and start feeding. And evidently, they eat her within the hour. How does she get them to eat her? Do they just know this instinctually? They know this instinctually. What they do is basically inject this enzyme-laden gut juice and break down the inside of her body.

You know, it's almost like they slurp her up through a straw. Like a protein milkshake. Eating her alive. Yeah, eating her alive. And then they will hang out for another three, four weeks together. So there's a mass of these baby spiders, and then they'll disperse from the web to become adults. It is just natural.

I would call it parental behavior, to a degree that we would consider to be extreme. They turn out to be just awesome mothers. The act of inducing the young to come to her and start feeding on her is absolutely intentional. She is inviting them. She's asking them to do this, and this is her sacrifice for her youngsters. This happens every day, these quiet, selfless acts all around us, and we have no idea. We've been making Criminal for more than three years. And when we began, we set out to explore stories about crime that went places you might not have seen coming.

And so, we thought we'd try our hand at something new. A subject as enormous and varied and arguably overexposed as crime. Love. Criminal isn't going anywhere. But we're also going to bring you this new thing, a show about people, not spiders, dealing with the inescapable nature of love, and how a simple act of love isn't always pretty or grand, and doesn't always make things better, but can change the course of it all. We're incredibly excited about these stories, and we hope you'll listen. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love. You can subscribe in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at thisislovepodcast.com.

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