Pirate's Cove

I’d be willing to pay a tax to stop this from happening. Creepy little buggers

Arctic Wolf Spiders Are Getting Bigger and It Could Slow Part of Climate Change

Spiders and snakes and bugs, oh my. The world is teeming with different kinds of critters, and there’s a phobia for anything you could possibly imagine. Arachnophobia, in particular, which is the extreme fear of spiders, seems especially common in the world. According to Merriam-Webster, arachnophobia is characterized as a “pathological fear or loathing of spiders.” Studies have found that exposure therapy as well as memory-disruption therapy have been most helpful in treating phobias like this.

Well, thanks to new studies on spiders released this week, there’s good news for the planet but some bad news for anyone who might be deathly afraid of spiders. According to National Geographic, stunning new calculations show that in the Arctic tundra, arctic wolf spiders outweigh arctic wolves in biomass by a ratio of 80 to 1. That’s right, when you think of white wolves roaming around and playing in the snow in the Arctic, that idyllic picture of the landscape is not totally accurate. What you should actually be thinking of is a bunch of snowy spiders spinning webs. These new calculations also show that, thanks to climate change, those eight-legged beasts are getting bigger.

In reality, none of the articles state how much bigger. Perhaps somewhere in the paper it does, but, I’m not finding it. They do seem to have a bit more mass, and there are more of the creepy little (venomous) hairy buggers. The warming in the Arctic, which they blame almost solely on Mankind’s output of greenhouse gases, has caused a change in the permafrost, giving the spiders new areas, and change their eating habits a bit, and changed the ecosphere. And we all know that everything was exactly the same during the previous 4.5 billion years prior to fossil fueled vehicles, eh?

A study from 2009 found that earlier springs and longer summers could increase the size of spiders and allow them to produce more offspring, a theory which might be proven to be correct by the PNAS study. But it’s not all terrifying news. Amanda Koltz, who conducted the PNAS study in the Arctic found that plots of land with more spiders had lower rates of decomposition, because areas with more spiders also had more populations of fungus-eating arthropods known as springtails, as reported by National Geographic. And because so many fungus-munching critters now exist in the Arctic, they’re lowering the rate of decomposition, meaning it’s keeping the ecosystem safe. Essentially, they’re helping to slow down climate change, if only a little bit.

So even if you hate them or experience arachnophobia yourself, the planet still owes a big thank you to spiders for helping us fight global warming, a little bit of permafrost at a time.

It’s almost like nature does stuff then has methods to deal with that stuff.

I’d still be willing to pay $10 a month just on tiny chance that mankind is responsible.