The spider is a hunter, and its web is a snare designed to hold its prey. So the design of its web and the place where the spider builds it depend on the kind of insects it is trying to catch. There are more insects, especially crawling ones, closer to the ground. Spiders often spin webs across ground litter such as leaves and fallen branches where an unsuspecting insect may crawl. Strong flying insects are usually higher, so webs built high are stronger than those built in low spots.
WEB SPINNERS
There are five different types of web-spinning spiders. One kind is cobweb spiders, such as black widows. They use their webs as “trip lines” to snare prey. From their web, several vertical lines are drawn down and secured tautly to a surface with globs of “glue.” Insects get stuck to the glue and break the line. The tension of the elastic trip lines, once released, flings the victim up to the spider waiting in its web. Cobweb weavers usually build only one web and so, with time, the web becomes tattered and littered with bits of debris.
The second kind of web spinner is called a sheetbuilder. They construct a horizontal mat beneath a horizontal trip line, much like a trampoline under an invisible wire. Flying or jumping insects that are stopped midair by the line are flung to the net below, and as the prey struggles to regain its balance, the agile spider pounces and inflicts a deadly bite.
Web-casting spiders, such as ogre-faced spiders, are the third kind of web spinner. They use “web snares” much differently than others. Instead of attaching the web to a bush or a wall, the spider carries it. The spider uses the web much like a fishing net and casts it on passing prey. The spider hunts every night and afterward will either tuck the web away until the next day's hunt or spin a new one.
Then there are the angle lines, such as the bola spider. It first suspends itself from a trapeze line and hangs there upside down. Then it sends down a single line baited with a glob of glue. When an insect moves by, the bola takes careful aim and casts the line toward the insect. If successful, it will reel in its prize easily.
Lastly, there are orb weavers. These weavers spin the largest and strongest webs. Some webs span more than one meter. Natives of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands used the webs of the orb-weaving spiders as fishing nets. These webs were reportedly strong enough to hold a fish weighing as much as a pound. These webs are especially tailored to capture flying insects, which is why they're vertically suspended. Many orb weavers meticulously take down their webs each day and build a new one at night.
Orb weavers spin such intricate webs that they are often the focus of behavioral studies. For example, two orb weavers went along on Sky Lab II on July 28, 1973. Researchers were interested to know the effects of zero gravity on the spiders' weaving ability. After some adjustments, the spiders were able to weave fairly normal webs. One curious difference was that the space webs were symmetrical, while earth webs tend to be asymmetrical.
RECLUSIVE STILL
Only eight hundred deaths from brown recluse spiders have been verified in medical literature since 1965, but more than eight hundred death certificates list a cause of death as “hemolytic anemia,” an allergic reaction to—the bite of the brown recluse.
TRUE SLOTH
In 2007, after three years of failed attempts to entice a sloth into budging as part of an experiment in animal movement, scientists in the eastern German city of Jena gave up. The sloth, named Mats, was remanded to a zoo after consistently refusing to climb up and then back down a pole as part of an experiment conducted by scientists at the University of Jena's Institute of Systematic Zoology and Evolutionary Biology.
Neither pounds of cucumbers nor plates of homemade spaghetti were appetizing enough to make Mats move. Mats's new home is the zoo in the northwestern city of Duisburg where, according to all reports, he is very comfortable.
A rat can last longer without water than a camel. Rats can also hold their breath for three minutes and tread water for three days.
Rats multiply so quickly that in eighteen months, two rats could have over a million descendants.
THE RAT TALES
Deserved or not, rats have always received bad press. One reason the Egyptians had a cat goddess was because her feline children ate the rodents that ate Egyptian grain. We remember Dick Whittington and his cat, because the cat saved London from an invasion of rats—rats carrying the Black Death—in the Middle Ages.
There is only one known rat goddess. The Malekulans, who live on the island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, have a goddess named Le-Hev-Hev, whose name translates as “she who smiles so we can draw near and she can eat us.” They offered her boars so she wouldn't eat human corpses.
The best rat story concerns the Pied Piper, that magical fellow who lived in early thirteenth-century Germany and had a magic flute whose tune attracted rats. He traveled about the countryside offering to drive the rats out of towns and into a cave under a mountain for a fee. When he visited Hamelin, the good burghers hired him, and he whistled the rats away. But the burghers neglected to pay him. So the Pied Piper changed his tune and led the town's children under the mountain with his whistle.
WHEN RATS TAKE OVER
During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church decided that cats were agents of the devil and ordered the extermination of all felines. For two hundred years, there were cat burnings and other forms of cat murder. If you tried to protect your puss, you could be burned at the stake as a witch. Consequently, the population of cats in Europe was decimated, which had an effect the church hadn't considered—the rat population, now unchecked, exploded. And so did the Black Plague, which was spread by fleas on rats. By the time the church saw the error of its ways and reversed its order, decreeing that good Christians must treat cats kindly, 75 percent of the population of Europe had died in the Plague. Cats' revenge, perhaps?
A WHALE OF A TIME
Female blue whales give birth to calves every two to three years. Pregnancy lasts for about one year. A newborn calf is about 23 feet (7 m) long and weighs 5,000 to 6,000 pounds (2,700 kg). A nursing mother produces over 50 gallons (200 liters) of milk a day. The milk contains 35 to 50 percent fat and allows the calf to gain weight at a rate of up to 10 pounds an hour—or over 250 pounds (44 kg) a day! At six months the calf is weaned, and at that point its average length is about 52 feet (16 m). The blue whale reaches sexual maturity in ten years.
WOMAN'S BEST FRIEND
A woman in California who ran a successful coffee business had her canine companion constantly at her side. One afternoon while taking a much needed break, her dear doggie began to sniff and lick at her breast area. That night, her dog repeated the odd behavior by tugging at the blankets and biting at her pajama shirt. The next day, the canine jumped into her lap and dove at her breasts, which caused some pain. She was stunned to discover that she had a lump in her breast, and later medical tests revealed it to be a cancerous tumor. She had had a routine breast exam just three months earlier, but the odd behavior of her dog saved her life. If the tumor had developed more extensively, it could have spread into her lymph nodes. After months of chemotherapy and radiation, she is now living cancer free.
OAK TREES DO NOT PRODUCE ACORNS UNTIL THEY ARE AT LEAST FIFTY YEARS OLD.
FIBONACCI FLOWERS
Plants with spiral patterns related to the golden angle (an angle related to the golden ration or “divine proportion”) consistently display another fascinating mathematical property: the seeds of the flower head form interlocking spirals going both clockwise and counterclockwise. These numbers of seeds are almost always two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. Fibonacci numbers form a sequence in which each number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on).
Daphnomancy is the word for divination through bay leaves. The word pays homage to Daphne, a nymph from ancient Greek myths who was turned into the first bay laurel tree when fleeing Apollo's flirtatious advances.
The eggplant is a member of the thistle family.
Throughout the 1500s to the 1700s, toba
cco was prescribed as medicine for a variety of complaints, including headaches, toothaches, arthritis, and bad breath.
HEROIC HERBAL
Yarrow, Alchillea millefolium, takes its Latin name from Achilles, the invincible Greek warrior who had but one vulnerable spot—his heel. When his heel was sliced, yarrow was used to assuage the bleeding. Even today, one of the most well-known medicinal uses for yarrow is to staunch bleeding. The shape of the yarrow's leaves also form tiny arrows, which look like Achilles's bow and arrow. Yarrow was also used as the original sticks in the Chinese oracle, the I-Ching.
MORBID PLANTS
VAMPIRE LILY (DRACUNCULUS VULGARIS)
No freakish garden is complete without the beloved vampire lily, Dracunculus vulgaris. Also called the dragon arum, it belongs to the Araceae family. Sporting an incredible, deep red flower with a ruffled edge and a long black or deep purple spadix, the vampire lily brings to mind the gown you wished you had for last Halloween's costume contest. Even the stems are gothic looking; they are a mottled green and red, as if they have been splattered with blood. One of the creepiest aspects of this plant, and no doubt what brought on the fantastically vampiric associations, is the fact that it emits a smell like that of rotting flesh. This scent attracts the flies and carrion beetles that pollinate it. The flower's deceptive beauty lures human garden visitors into its realm, enticing them to put their noses into the blood red curls of the blossom and inhale deeply, only to be horrified and repelled by the flower's sweet and sickening smell of death.
VOODOO LILY (SAUROMATUM GUTTATUM)
What could be more bewitching than a plant with such a ghoulish name? The voodoo lily, Sauromatum guttatum, sometimes identified as S. venosum, derives its name from its speckled, bloody red flower foul, corpselike smell. Adapted to attract flies and beetles as its pollinators, the voodoo lily's flower forms with a tall central spike, or spadix, surrounded by the spathe. For the voodoo lily, the spadix is the richest of reds, and the spathe is a vibrant red spotted with deep burgundy. Especially enchanting even when not in bloom, the voodoo lily has speckled leaf spikes that appear after the single flower has come and gone, shooting up and branching out to look like miniature gothic tropical trees, green and smattered with blood red spots at the base. The voodoo lily is bizarre, enchanting, and gorgeously ghastly.
OF ALL PUMPKINS SOLD IN THE UNITED STATES, 99 PERCENT END UP AS JACK-O'-LANTERNS.
THE CORPSE FLOWER (AMORPHOPHALLUS TITANUM)
No list of botanical oddities would be complete without the one and only corpse flower. Named for its extremely potent, corpselike smell, Amorphophallus titanum is also one of the largest flower structures in the world. Growing up to twelve feet tall and five feet wide in the wild, with leaves that can exceed twenty feet, the corpse flower, also known as the titan arum, is both ghastly and breathtaking. (You actually will want to hold your breath when near it in its fullest bloom.) The flower comes before the leaves, although the plant needs to be at least six years old before it can bloom. When it does, a large mottled spike pushes up from the ground, slowly unfurling to reveal a beautiful, deep red, velvet outer spathe and a three-foot, dirty green spike in the center. When fully opened, the bloom of the corpse flower begins to live up to its rotten reputation, for it emits the strongest and most foul of decomposing fleshlike odors. The smell is caused by the most wicked of essential oils—putrecines and cadavarines. A foul beauty, the corpse flower looks like something from the musical Little Shop of Horrors, and anyone who has seen and smelled it will not quickly forget its cadaverous horrors.
OTHER FREAKY, STINKY PLANTS
There are, besides the vampire lily, the voodoo lily, and the corpse flower, many other unusual plants in the Araceae family. For blood red and blackish flowers, check out Arum apulum, A. dioscoridis, A. oriental, and A. pictum, as well as Biarum tenufolium and Biarum tenufolium var. zeleborii. Another plant that smells of rotting flesh is the aptly named dead horse arum, Helicodiceros muschivorus.
3. HISTORY'S MYSTERIES
BIZARRE BUT TRUE FACTS ABOUT HISTORICAL FIGURES,
AND ODDITIES FROM TODAY AND YESTERDAY
“The professors must not prevent us from realizing that history is fun, and that the most bizarre things really happen.” —BERTRAND RUSSEL
FAMOUS NAMES, UNFORTUNATE DEATHS
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S DEATH
Benjamin Franklin died, strangely enough, from complications from sitting in front of an open window. Franklin was a big believer in fresh air, even in the middle of winter. He slept with the windows open year-round, and, as he wrote, “I rise almost every morning and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season.” In April 1790, the eighty-four-year-old Franklin developed an abscess in his lungs, which his doctor blamed on too many hours spent sitting at the open window. The abscess burst on April 17, sending him into a coma. He died a few hours later.
THE DEATH OF JOSEPH STALIN
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who murdered millions of his own country's people, may have been the last victim of his own reign of terror. On the evening of March 1, 1953, the seventy-four-year-old Stalin stayed up drinking with his cronies until 4 A.M. His normal habit was to rise again around noon, but that day he didn't.
As the hours passed and Stalin did not emerge from his private quarters, his aides began to panic. They didn't want to risk his wrath, but they were worried. At 10:30 P.M., they finally worked up the nerve to enter his apartments, where they found him sprawled out on his living room floor, paralyzed by a stroke, and unable to speak. The terrified aides still did not know what to do, so they didn't call for the Kremlin doctors until 8:30 the following morning! By then it was too late: according to Stalin's daughter Svetlana, the dictator died a difficult and terrible death four days later.
THE EUTHANIZATION OF KING GEORGEV
King George V of England, grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, was euthanized with morphine and cocaine to meet a newspaper deadline.
The king, a heavy smoker, was in the final stages of lung disease on January 20, 1936. His death was imminent. The date of the state funeral had been set, and the London Times had been instructed to hold the presses—a death announcement would be coming soon. But that night, as the newspaper's deadline loomed, the king still held on. The king's doctor, who saw that the king's condition might last for many more hours and disrupt the arrangements, decided to euthanize him so that the morning papers could still make the announcement that the king was dead.
DIAMOND JIM BRADY
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century millionaire, collector of fine gems (hence the nickname), and one of the world's all-time great eaters, Diamond Jim Brady, in fact, ate himself to death.
A typical day for Brady started with a breakfast of steak, eggs, cornbread, muffins, pancakes, pork chops, fried potatoes, and hominy, washed down with a gallon or more of orange juice. Breakfast was followed with snacks at 11:30, lunch at 12:30, and afternoon tea—all of which involved enormous quantities of food. Dinner often consisted of three dozen oysters, six crabs, two bowls of soup, seven lobsters, two ducks, two servings of turtle meat, plus steak, vegetables, a full platter of pastries, and a two-pound box of chocolates.
When Brady suffered an attack of gallstones in 1912, his surgeons opened him up and found that his stomach was six times the normal size of a human stomach and covered in so many layers of fat they couldn't complete the surgery. Diamond Jim ignored their advice to cut back, yet hung on another five years, albeit in considerable pain from diabetes, bad kidneys, stomach ulcers, and heart problems. He died of a heart attack in 1917.
CATHERINE THE GREAT
There are probably more rumors about the death of Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia, than that of any other monarch in history. Most of them relate to her reputedly unusual sexual appetites. For some reason, many people believe a horse was being lowered onto her when the cable holding the horse aloft snapped, crushing her. That is a complete myth—perh
aps invented by the French, Russia's enemies at the time.
What really happened? Two weeks after suffering a mild stroke at the age of sixty-seven, Catherine appeared to be recovering. On November 5, she began her day with her usual routine, rising at 8 A.M., drinking several cups of coffee, and going to spend ten minutes in the bathroom. But she did not come out after ten minutes, and when her footman finally looked in on her, he found her sprawled out on the floor, bleeding and barely alive. Like Elvis Presley, she had a stroke while sitting on the toilet. She died the next day.
GEORGE EASTMAN
George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak and the father of modern photography, committed suicide. In 1932, Eastman was seventy-eight years old and felt tired and ill. On March 14, he updated his will, and later in the day, he asked his doctor and his nurses to leave the room, telling them he wanted to write a note. It turned out to be a suicide note. He wrote the note, put out his cigarette, removed his glasses, and shot himself in the heart.
The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories Page 4
