Eight-Legged Wonders: The Surprising Lives of Spiders

This lighthearted debut from zoologist O’Hanlon surveys the remarkable behavior and abilities of arachnids. Examining spiders’ hunting strategies, O’Hanlon notes that Portia jumping spiders will wait for wind to blow before moving in on prey so the sound muffles their footsteps, and that European purse-web spiders construct camouflaged silk tubes where they wait for prey to approach, at which point they puncture the silk with their fangs to deliver venom and then pull the prey inside. O’Hanlon offers a sometimes nauseating account of spider mating rituals, explaining how a male Australian red-back will transfer sperm using small appendages under his head even as the female he’s mating with begins to eat his rear end. Spiders have developed clever ways to get around quickly, O’Hanlon writes, describing how some species produce electrostatically charged silk that, when released near naturally occurring electromagnetic fields, can propel the arachnids miles into the air. O’Hanlon punctuates the proceedings with humor (“Sadly, no matter how clumsy a lab assistant I was, I wasn’t bitten by a single radioactive spider,” he recalls about working in a lab next to a cobalt radiation storage facility), and even arachnophobes will marvel at the strange world O’Hanlon reveals. Erudite yet conversational, this entrances. (Sept.)