SciShow Tangents - Fear Month: Spiders!

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

SciShow Tangents' Month of Fear concludes with what is undeniably the scariest, most valid fear of any of those discussed... spiders! I'm not saying spiders will pour out of your headphones and into your ears when you listen to this, but I'm also not promising they won't.Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!  If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links![Truth or Fail]Recordshttps://thevinylfactory.com/features/the-10-weirdest-things-pressed-into-vinyl-records-this-year/https://www.npr.org/2016/01/09/462289635/bones-and-grooves-weird-secret-history-of-soviet-x-ray-musicTattooshttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/gwitchin-tattoo-skin-stitching-first-nations-1.3796606Canvaseshttps://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2008/07/cobwebportraits.htmlhttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-lost-art-of-painting-on-cobweb-canvaseshttps://phys.org/news/2010-05-scientists-goats-spider-silk.html[Fact Off][Ask the Science Couch]Web constructionhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-smithsonian-how-do-spiders-make-webs-180957426/https://sciencing.com/identify-spider-pattern-8635659.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6053566/Making silkhttps://www.livescience.com/32582-how-do-spiders-make-silk.htmlhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/spidroins[Butt One More Thing]Trashline orb weavershttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-spiders-that-completely-defy-what-we-know-as-jet-lag/https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/trashline-orbweavers

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I am joined joined by stephan what's your tagline birthday cake oreos sam schultz is also here hello what's your tagline not quite a mop not quite a puppet sari riley has joined us too i'm here you're welcome oh my god more energy still sari what's your tagline a really long egg every week you're on size your tangents we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts we're playing for glory but we're also keeping score and awarding hank bucks from week to week we do everything we can to stay on topic but sometimes we go on tangents that's why the podcast is called size show tangents and if we deem the tangent unworthy of being tangented

we will force you to give up a Hank buck. So tangent with care. And for this, the scariest month of all, and our final episode in that scary, scary month, we're doing a different thing. Each episode in October, we have covered topics that are our panelists' greatest fears. And finally, we've gotten to Sam, who is going to share his greatest fear and introduce it to us via the science poem. Of all the creatures, small and wider, the worst to me must be the spider. They're big and hairy, crawly and brown. I'd like to die when they're around. I check my bedsheets every night in case one's waiting to give me a bite. I cannot go into basements or

cellars for fear of meeting eight-legged dwellers. In every room, I check the ceiling, and if there's a spider, I run off squealing. But in my heart of hearts, I know the little guys just want to go and spin a web and eat a fly. And that is why I've sworn that I would never smash one with a shoe.

And in one's life, that's not nice to do. And that brings me to my dark confession. I make my wife do all the smashing. That was great, Sam. Congratulations on your Hank book. Thanks. And on your great poem. And on your pretty normal fear.

Yeah. It's kind of a boring one. It's a pretty common one. I'm legitimately afraid of them. They have too many legs. Yeah. And they're always hanging out. And they got biteys.

They got those bites. If they're outside, I don't smash them. Oh, sure. If they're inside hanging out and they got they got biteys. They got those bites. If they're outside, I don't smash them. Oh, sure. If they're inside, there are no rules. So, Sari, what's a spider? They're an arachnid. Yeah. Eight legs.

They're an arthropod. They're an arthropod. Yeah. They're a bug. If you define bug is like a crawly thing on land. Yeah, I do. Then they're a bug. But not an insect. No. Are they the only thing that has eight legs

other than an octopus no mites uh also what are mites arachnids yes ticks daddy long legs i think have eight legs but aren't a spider they're huntsmen that's true yeah yeah but they're all related to each other they're all arachnids is a crab a spider? No. Okay. There are spider crabs, though. Right. In the ocean. And there are also crab spiders. Oh, confusing. Their body plans are just very, very weird. And I didn't realize how weird they were.

I didn't think about it. Because I just kind of avoided spiders in my everyday life. But they have eight legs. Chilicerae, which I think are the little, like, pincy... I'm making an motion on the podcast. I know what you mean. The little mouth things that are like extra little legs on their mouths. Bangs that they can inject venom with. Ew.

They have spinnerets, which are like the silk organs. This spider I'm looking at right now has two normal eyes that I think would be a little bit cute if it didn't have a full mustache of other eyes. I couldn't really find a good explanation of arachnophobia. My guesses are they like skitter across the ground, so they move in a way

that is foreign to humans. Have you ever been in a really quiet room and heard one's little feets on the ground? No! I have. I always have music playing to avoid that fate. I sit in quiet rooms a lot, but I never hear spiders. They like crawl out of my ceiling.

And as long as they don't leave the ceiling, my relationship with them is I'll leave them be. Because they'll crawl back into the ceiling. You got a bunch of ceiling holes? Yeah, I live on the top floor of a house. So I think it's like what used to be an attic. Just a bunch of slats. Bunch of ceiling holes. I also have a bunch of ceiling holes.

And if they're up there, I'm not going to do anything. If they're above my bed, though. So there are rules. That is not necessarily a hard and fast rule because if it's big and creepy enough, then it will die. Okay. I was always scared of spiders because I would run face first into their webs without seeing them. That's another thing. They're on you.

And so I think they interact with us more. They alter the environment in an unpleasant way. They can make your day worse. Also, they are venomous. They can do damage to a person. So I think it's normal to be afraid of them. It's normal to be afraid of snakes because they can kill you. I think part of it is also conditioning.

So people seeing that other people are afraid of spiders. So if you have a parent who is afraid of spiders, you're going to learn to be afraid of spiders. Yeah, and Halloween decorations. Yeah, we like the spiders that are just bones. I love those kind of Halloween decorations where they just make things bones that don't have bones. And we got some gross spiders here. Hobo spiders are the most scary-looking spider.

I hate them. They look like the spiders are the most scary looking spider they look like the spiders made of bones yeah they do and they're aggressive which is the thing I don't like a hobo spider is like I'm gonna come at you and I'm like no I'm so big go go away

I am scared of you but I can't kill you one lunged at me once it was stuck to one of those spider traps and I picked picked it up, and the hobo spider was like, and I was like, and I threw it away across the room and just left it there for a long time. I hate spider traps because then you can see just how many are in your walls because only a small fraction of them are there. I just would rather not know. And that means it's time for Truth or Fail.

So Sari has brought three facts for our enjoyment, but two of those facts are big, fat lies. And it's our job to suss out the truth. And if we get it right, we get a Hank Buck. If Sari fools us, you get a Hank Buck. So there's a lot on the line here, and I

need to come back. You can't in this this episode, catch up with anyone. I can't catch up with anyone? No, not if you... Can't even catch Stefan? You can make a dent in him. Oh, my God. A bunch of material science stories these days are touting spider silk as miraculous material

to make bulletproof clothing or artificial tendons or surgical thread. But historically, we didn't just use it for practical inventions. We also used it in art so which of these artistic uses of spider silk is true one creating fragile bootlegged records in times of cultural censorship number two dipping them in ink and using them to cut into skin and make intricate tattoos excuse me or three creating really delicate canvases for small watercolor portraits i mean the first two are not possible this the third one is boring so it has to be one of the first first two which are both not possible we've got creating a fragile bootleg record out of spider silk like a vinyl record record? Yeah. But spider silk?

Like I put it on a record player? Yeah, like you put it on a record player. Okay. Two, dipping it into ink and tattooing yourself with spider silk. Via cuts. Like poking. Poking it into you.

Okay. Or three, creating delicate canvases for small watercolor portraits. That sounds like a very Victorian era thing to do is have a creepy little spider web portrait of yourself.

Sure, yeah, that's good. And it's, you know, it's sturdy. I don't know why we don't use spider silk instead of like caterpillar silk, which is what we use to make silk. But I guess it's just because caterpillars make a lot more of it. The problem with spiders is that they're always competing with each other, which is why everyone's like, how do we genetically engineer other things to make spider silk? They're always competing with each other to do what to eat food and then they like there are spiders that eat other spiders i guess caterpillars are doing that too but they live in a more solitary right life where they just kind of sit and they make their cocoon i feel like a group

of people would have decided that using silk in the tattoo would be like a cool ritual. Yeah. Or like some kind of. I don't understand how it would work, but like it's very thin. So I feel like you could make it go in if you could get it to be strong enough. The thing I will say is spider silk can get very strong. People in certain cultures use spider silk without any modifications as fishing line. Oh. And things like that.

So like that is how tough. Do they have to like weave it into the, into like a thread? Or just buy a strand? Yeah. It. So like that is how tough. weave it into the, into like a thread or just buy a strand? Yeah, it's just like a strand. It can like have pretty strong tensile strength.

Sorry, I thought this was a thing that people knew. No, you can just catch a fish. You didn't tell me about the fishing. I should have made

my fact easier. Oh, I was like, everyone's going to know about all the uses of spider silk. Oh man. The record sounds the fakest. You have to collect so much spider web, I think like, everyone's going to know about all the uses of spider silk. Oh, man. The record sounds the fakest.

You have to collect so much spider web, I think. Do you melt it down? How do you make a disc out of it? I don't know. I think we can safely disc it out. We can discode that. I think that that's a dangerous thing to say. I agree with you, but I'm terrified.

I think I'm going to go tattoo oh i think i'm gonna go tiny watercolor portrait okay i'm also gonna go tattoo okay uh it is the tiny canvases well at least hank's not catching up to me it just sounds like something that would go hand in hand with like a mummy party and like going to a psychic or was it was it cute though were they creepy or were they just like these like normal paint i don't know they were like they did a lot of religious painting back then this is like a little sheet they're a little creepy though because they're translucent yeah they just collected webs so these paintings were usually like three inches by four inches so really really small and they would mostly collect

cobwebs from funnel web spiders which are thicker okay yeah webs to strengthen it they brushed it with milk i don't know i like really tried to find why that did anything the closest thing i could find was that nowadays there are genetic engineers at the university of wyoming that are creating spider silk proteins in goat milk. And so there must be something to do with the protein composition of milk that is similar enough to the protein composition of the spider silk to make it possible. And so painting milk on spider silk

makes it stronger for some reason. So I shouldn't just paint milk on stuff to make it stronger. I don't know. Maybe your bones. My bones. Yeah. It'd be hard to paint milk on my my own bones austrian peasants are the ones who did portraits mostly so they know the secret is paint milk on everything and then your problems will be fixed everything stinks but it's very

strong they didn't have anything else besides milk, so that was the only choice they had. And they were just these very, very delicate canvases that they painted with watercolor or India ink. No one really knows why they did it. They were poor, so they probably couldn't afford the fancy artistic supplies. I don't know. Wasting milk and painting on spider silk canvases sounds like a very rich thing to me. Yes, it does sound very decadent. Well, it's a little bit of milk. These are small canvases.

And they got lots of milk. They're peasants. That's all they have. What you have as a peasant is milk and free time. The entire winter, there's nothing to do except starve. So it's just like, let's take some funnel web spiders out of the ground and just weave. I'm sorry if there's any Austrian peasants listening. I didn't mean to belittle your existence.

I don't know. All the articles I read also said it at the time. As you're bored in the winter and painting, you can express your spiritual devotion. Like, this thing took a really long time to paint. So, if you painted someone's portrait, they'll pay you a lot of money for it because they, like, seen themselves. Or you can, like, express your spiritual dedication and be like, hello, I'm patient enough to do this. So what about this record? The record is just a fact

that I haven't been able to squeeze into tangents about bone music. You can't waste this now. It's too late, but I... It's too late. If there's a thing called bone music, that has to be the main attraction.

I don't think... I couldn't find a way to fit it in. I got impatient. I've been thinking about bone music that has to be the main attraction i don't think i couldn't find a way to fit it in i got impatient i've been thinking about bone music for at least two years now around world war ii soviet union was a place where like a lot of culture was being put under censorship especially music from other countries and so people would sell records on the black market that were made out of x-rays. And so they would take an x-ray and put it in some sort of recording machine that would do very, very small grooves in it to get like one song.

So they're really crude, pretty fragile. But then you can go on the black market or like walk through the streets and be like, hey, you got this song. So it's in the vinyl of the x-ray or whatever that material is in the photograph. Yes. So it looks like you're buying the picture of a bone, but you're actually buying Jimi Hendrix. See, this is also a problem of not knowing music.

I imagine like in my head, you could just spin spider silk in a circle and that would make the same thing as music maybe. But apparently. You know how records work, right? I actually don't't i think it's like grooves and vibrations yeah it's grooves and vibrations just the waveform of the noise is actually physically in it okay and the needle moves and that gets amplified by electromagnetism but sari's a ghost who lives in an attic and she makes music by waving spider webs i guess i wasn't thinking of like a web either and like a web shape yeah more

close to a vinyl record i was just thinking of like a strand and i'm like i don't know what you do with that well i do think that it's impossible but maybe it's not we can do anything we're humans if we put our minds to it we can solve global warming and make music on spider webs and then tattoos what do people tattoo themselves with i learned about a thing called skin stitching which is an indigenous tattooing technique in the u.s it's a lot like sewing so you have a needle and thread and then you dip the thread and ink and you like sew through skin thread is part of it then the thread doesn't like disappear or anything no you pull it. So you like thread it through. And the thread is just a mechanism to deposit the ink.

Now it's time to go on to our short break and then the fact off. Welcome back. Sari, you're in the tie with two points. And Sam also has two points. And Stefan and I suck at the hang with zero. One of us will come away with something because it's time for the fact. Hank versus Stefan. thing because it's time for the fact of Hank versus Stefan. We have each

brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow your minds. And you each have a Hank buck to award to the fact that you like the most. But if you hate both of them, you can just throw it away. So, who's going to go first? Oh, shoot. I had a whole thing. I was going to

do it as trivia, but I know the answer to the question. We need a better way to pick, and I i was like we'll do it as a trivia question it's like a mini game yeah but i know the answer because of how i thought up the question yes that is a fun so we need to we need to have someone else think up the question i have a question yeah how many different species of spider are there and And this is Price is Right rules. Price is Right rules. Okay, so who goes first? You should answer first.

Okay. All right, I'm going to go with, oh frick, 10,000. I'm going to say 45,000. Whoa. Just a rough guess. Wow. It's 40,000. Okay. No, Price is Right.

Yeah. Okay. The article I looked at said $45,000. Really? Wow. He knew. Okay. So one of my sources said $40,000.

This one says $35,000. This one says $43,000. They're all fewer than $45,000. Wow. Well, that's a lot of freaking spiders, you guys. I'm glad I didn't say $200,000. So I guess by pure luck luck i get to go first sam yes so you know how there's milk uh so all kinds of different kinds of milk you got breast

milk and cow's milk and goat's milk and you gotta buy some milk even pigs have milk but we don't drink it because it's really hard to get out of the pig if you're not a piglet. We've also got soy milks and almond milks. And there are even non-mammals that have milk. Pigeons have crop milk where they have their crops. It creates a thing that they regurgitate to their babies. It's, of course, not technically the same kind of lactation that we have, but it serves the same purpose. And they aren't mammals. So there are things that aren't mammals that kind of have milk but it serves the same purpose. And they aren't mammals. So there are

things that aren't mammals that kind of have milk, including... Scientists out of China discovered a new type of milk. It's spider milk. Very recently, spider milk was discovered. They were studying Toxius magnus, which is a type of jumping spider that primarily lives in Southeast Asia, and it's an ant mimic. So it mimics ants by having really big chelicera, or whatever they're called, those things. The mouth parts? The mouth parts. So they look like an extra body segment, and it takes its top two legs and waves them in the air like antenna instead of being legs. of being Lex. So it's an ant mimic, and they

noticed that baby Toxius Magnuses seem to take a long time to leave the nest. And then they started looking closer, and they found that in the first week after the spiders hatch, the mother leaves drops of milk

on the nest, which they then come back for, and it comes out of a spot on the underside of her abdomen. And when the spider are a week old, they begin sucking the milk directly from her body instead of drinking it off of the nest. And that continues for about 40 days, even as they then start going to forage for food on their own. They'll also come back and drink the milk from the mom.

And that takes the baby spiders right up to the edge of adulthood. If they were blocked from getting the milk early on, the baby spiders died in about 10 days. So it turns out they needed the milk. In their findings, the scientists hypothesized that the milk, which has about four times more protein than cow's milk, is made up of unviable eggs that get like re secreted for their nutritional value cool little omelette milk

from a spider's boob yeah just like abdomen nipple is there pictures of them eating the milk they're not really easy to see it happening. There's one really close-up picture of the milk that has come out of

the spider, and it's like, it looks a little like sap. It's like a light yellow color, and it's clear. Okay. So like pus almost, rather than milk. So this isn't going to be the next health craze. I mean, it's four times more protein.

I don't know. It'd be hard to milk a bunch of spiders. But the fact that you can buy royal jelly, I'm just like, okay, I guess we can do anything. This is fairly new. And it was, you know, the scientists were like, we kind of have to rethink a lot about what we, like, how we imagine insects. Because there's very few examples of like caring for babies and insects but maybe there are more we just haven't been looking for it so i thought that was gross and cool uh so a thing that i learned today is that some spiders are social which was not a thing i

had thought existed but out of the tens of thousands of species there are about 25 that we know of that are social and so live in like little colonies in one big web and sort of share in the responsibilities of raising the young and finding food. One specific species, Anelosimus studiosus, is known for having this behavioral dichotomy. Each colony will be either sort of aggressive, a more aggressive colony, or will be very docile. And this is a heritable trait. So they pass it on to their young and then their young go out and start new colonies that also have the same sort of temperament. Being more aggressive helps these

spiders acquire more resources when like food is a little more scarce, but it also makes them more likely to cannibalize the males and their eggs. And also there's more like infighting when times are tough. Among many things that happen with climate change, one of the things that is projected to happen is that there will be more of the most intense kinds of tropical cyclones. And so these spiders live sort of in the Gulf and like Atlantic coasts of the US and other areas. But this is where they were studying them because they wanted to see like how these like very intense cyclones, which are like very ecosystem disrupting events, like how the spiders fare and like in what ways it affects them. And so they studied 240 colonies around three tropical cyclone events in 2018. And once they had like a predicted path for the storm, they went out and collected data on colonies that

were in that path and also colonies that were not in the path as a control. And I love the way that they tested the aggressiveness because they basically stuck little pieces of paper on the web and held up an Oral-B toothbrush, like vibrating toothbrush, up to the piece of paper and

counted how many spiders attacked and how quickly to see like how aggressive they were. I hate this. So they did that before the storm and then revisited all the colonies right after the storm and then months later

to see like how many eggs they were producing and how many of the spider young were surviving to the point where they were ready to like leave the home and start their own colony. And in the cyclone-affected colonies,

the aggressive ones did much better and had more eggs and more surviving spiderlings. And at the control sites, there was the complete opposite effect. So selecting for more docile spiders outside of those areas. And so the increasing frequency of these tropical cyclones

because of climate change is potentially selecting for much more aggressive spiders in these columns that live in big groups on giant webs. This is your headline. Giant groups of spiders hitting you because of climate change. I'm just scared of the angry spiders and of other species becoming more aggressive now because of climate change. There's probably some species that are becoming more docile because of climate change too maybe because it's hot and they're sleepy because it's hot and they're sleepy or they're just all dead it's the the cutthroat people who survive in the apocalypse right i don't want that for us and i don't want

that for the spiders absolutely do you know if the toothbrush thing is standard for conducting they did say that that was a pretty common way that they used to test how aggressive spiders are. So I don't know if there's an Oral-B sponsorship or something. Or Oral-B can just make a specific spider vibrator. Let me think about that. All right. On three, say the name of your point getter one two three hank hey i'm coming for you boy thinking about the little spiders with their mouths up against their mom and just like so gross yeah you did the you decided to go for the creepiest one yeah how do you feel about

breastfeeding in humans well babies don't have little fangily mouse with extra pieces on them they're really cute yeah so like a vampire breastfeeding would be i don't even know what that is supposed to mean that's not how it works vampires are frozen in age so if you make a baby baby vampire they're baby forever it's very tragic you gotta yeah that's true twilight is what i was trying to say i don't know there's a baby vampire there isn't there oh i don't know i don't think wait i don't remember how bella's baby works okay so i do it's like blade. You know Blade? Yeah.

Okay, so he's a daywalker because his pregnant mother was bit by a vampire. Oh. But she was pregnant with a human baby. Right. Bella was pregnant with half vampire, half human baby. And it was too strong. It was ripping out of her. Right.

So she had to turn into a vampire. But it was just like a damn fear or something. It didn't have any vampire. I think it didn't need to like drink blood and stuff. I think it was just powerful like a daywalker. But it was just like a damn fear or something. It didn't have any vampire. I think it didn't need to like drink blood and stuff. I think it was just powerful like a day walker. But it can grow. Like that's the thing. Oh, it can grow. It grows really fast.

In fact, it grows faster than people. So it can fall in love with the werewolf and get married to it by the end of the book. That was it. That was the weird part that I was trying to remember. Thank you, Sam. Yeah, because it sees the first thing it sees when it comes out is the werewolf. And it's like. No, I don't. The werewolf fell in love with the baby that was the creepy part because like

the werewolf has one person that right they can fall in love with and they used to be bella yeah but then it was like oh i don't know do we get to talk both of them i think so i'm definitely taking i vote sam loses at least one tank buck. I know too much about this lore. I've only seen the last movie of any of it. I read all the books before they were popular because it was like, ooh, it's from Washington. So I think this is really cool. And I was like, they're really easy to read.

You wanted some tips on how to meet vampires. Wasn't Fifty Shades of Grey also in Washington? Fifty Shades of Grey is a fan fiction. It started out as Twilight fan fic. Oh, that's right. Well, there you go. It makes sense now. But, there's some movie promotional still where... Definitely talking sense.

Where the dude, the mean dude is standing in a building looking over the Puget Sound and if there was a building there, it would have been in the middle of the water. So they didn't even get the picture right. They took a drone shot or something, and the skyscraper couldn't have been there. At this point, I think Sari might need to lose two Hank bucks. She tangented her own Twilight tangent with a Puget Sound tangent.

So this is where we ask listener questions to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. And it's from at Cynthia X Mary, who asks, for real, how does the web thing work? Where do they come from? Is it stored somewhere or liquid secreted? And then it gets fibrous. How do they build them so fast and so intricate? Do different spiders have different web patterns? I know the answer to that last one, which is yes.

Different spiders have different web patterns. And spider silk, I know, is there's a thing called the spinneret and it's secreted from a gland on their butt. And that's all I know. I know one more thing, which is that there's multiple glands that produce different kinds of silk. The glands are called spinnerets and apparently spiders can have between two and eight of them on their butts.

Of course they can have eight. What's interesting is spinneret glands solidify the silk by acidifying the proteins, which is interesting. Before it gets into the gland, it's a liquid. And then when it enters the gland, it's like an acid bath that converts it into a solid protein fiber. It's apparently a similar chemical process, not in the chemicals involved, but in the liquid turning into a protein chain, how fibers like nylon are made. Orb weaver spiders are the webs

that we're most familiar with. They're the that like on a halloween display that spider web is an orb weaver spider web and so the way that they do it is they produce multiple strands of silk that make sort of a balloon and i don't know i guess they connect in some way so i don't think it makes a solid like bubble but enough and it waits for the wind to blow it somewhere and snag onto something, and then it pulls that line taut. And then it does that a couple other times, just like waiting for the wind to carry its silk in a direction until it attaches to something.

And then when it has a network of non-silky, when it has a network of non-sticky silk in all these different directions, then that's when it joins them at the center and starts to do the concentric circles. Of sticky silk. Yeah. Sticky is the concentric for most standard orb weavers. And there are, of course, tons of variations.

Some of them weave patterns into their webs for reasons that we know about. Like if they camouflage themselves or don't know about because they're just like weird zigzag we don't know if it's structural integrity or if it's like a surface can they get stuck to their own webs yeah okay and so that's in a very sad way well don't worry about them even though i'm afraid of them they can get stuck to their own webs i think there are like usually they're really careful when manipulating their own webs and they know where they've put down different silk i don't know i don't want to anthropomorphize them but they also have like that's why they're hairy is i think that helps them stay like being more

non-stick so the part of the question where it asks how they do it so fast the answer is that they don't necessarily do it very fast okay yeah intricate just takes time apparently spiders eat their webs can i eat a spider web protein in there probably not probably not i mean you could you could i don't think it would harm you people have used spider webs for medicinal purposes it's like a survivalist tip that if you have a bleeding wound or something bundle up a spider web hopefully it doesn't have much like dirt and stuff or Or just decaying bugs. And then stuff it in your wound and it'll help with healing.

Stuff it in your wound. Sounds like a great thing to say to somebody who's been mean to you. Stuff it in your wound, Jeremy! If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Thank you to at SociologyNodes at Scarlet127 and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode. So, there was a serious lapse into a tangent about Twilight, the books, that lost both Sari and Sam

one point, and so somehow I have come out victorious. Disgusting. With two points. Sari and Sam each have one, and Stefan pulling up in the rear. I'm an Austrian peasant. If you like the show and you want to help us out,

it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful. It lets us know what you like about the show. Also, we're going to be looking at iTunes reviews for topic ideas for future episodes. So leave those there. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. If you want to read more about any of today's topics, check out SciShowTangents.org to find links to our sources

and pictures of spiders. And if you haven't, you can go back and listen to all of the fear-based episodes we've put up this month. Hurry, while it's still the Halloween season. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the Wicked Wonderful Team at WNYC Studios.

It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our eerie editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sinister sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Our scary social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a coffin to be filled,

but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted there. But one more thing. There is a spider called a trash line or weaver who spin their webs and camouflage themselves with a vertical thread through it made out of trash including leftover insect carcasses poop or other stray debris and they also hide their egg sacs among the poop and trash because then predators just think this is a trashy web and then won't move by there's a floating turd over there i'm not going over there