Pete and his girlfriend Priscilla, ‘Cissy’ to most people, are sitting in front of the TV watching a
new reality show on Netflix called, “How desperate can you get?” The premise is that contestants have
to try to overcome their worst fears. If they can, their utility bills are paid for an entire decade.
Like all the episodes, this episode features unemployed people and people on low wages.
One of them, Gary, is incredibly scared of spiders. He’s what you
call an arachnophobe. He used to be medicated for his fear, before he lost his job, that is.
He’s so scared right now that a wet patch forms on his jeans as soon as he sees what
he has to do. The camera zooms in on it to raucous laughter from the studio audience.
He’s going to be covered in spiders, but not just any spiders. They will be the Brazilian
Wandering Spiders, sometimes said to have the most toxic spider venom in the world.
A bite from one of these things can cause serious injury or even
death. Their highly toxic venom can make a right mess of a person’s nervous system,
causing all sorts of symptoms, including a very irregular heartbeat or even a painful
erection that won’t go away. That’s because their venom increases the levels of nitrous oxide in
the body, which then increases blood flow. If things get worse, the person might vomit,
have painful abdominal cramps, blurred vision, convulsions, and,
at worst, die from shock. It’s no wonder the Greek word for them means “murderess.”
Gary has signed an Informed Consent Agreement, but even though the spiders can be aggressive,
they don’t usually bite if not provoked. They are being provoked because the show’s famous host,
Jake Paul, is pushing them around with a stick. The audience can’t get enough. They don’t feel
bad. They know there are nurses on standby who have some antivenom. Cissy is disgusted
but not disgusted enough to turn off the show. Meanwhile, Pete is in a kind of sitting fetal
position, barely able to look at the screen. He also has debilitating arachnophobia. The
other day, he screamed when he saw a harmless daddy long legs, or cellar spider to some.
Cissy reminded him that there was nothing to fear; they don’t even bite. But what
she doesn’t understand is his phobia is not about getting injured. It’s about the
spiders themselves. “It’s not rational,” said Sissy, to which Pete responded, “No,
it’s not, but please make it go away.” Pete is just glad that the Brazilian
Wandering Spider doesn’t live in North America but in countries in South America. Still, he read
a story about one ending up in the UK after being imported in a bunch of bananas. It even came with
an egg sack, which contained thousands of little spiderlings. The family later said they were “too
traumatized to remain in the house.” In 2005, a guy in the UK got bitten by a stowaway Wandering
Spider. He managed to take a photo of it before he passed out. He was later saved by antivenom.
Pete is thinking about these stories while watching the show. As he suspected, Gary fails
to win the prize. He can take no more. He stands up and screams and then runs through the studio,
madly brushing the spiders off his body. As usual, Jake Paul shouts the catchphrase to the audience,
“HOW DESPERATE IS HE?” and they all shout back in unison, “NOT DESPERATE ENOUGH!!”
Pete might be scared of spiders, but he’s also obsessed with them. For instance,
he knows there are about 50,000 species of spider in the world. Just the US alone has about 3,500
species, and while very few of them can pose a real threat to humans, all spiders have fangs.
They are all venomous, too, although some are much more venomous than others. That’s
how they do their dining. They catch their prey, sometimes with a web or by ambush,
and then stick those fangs into it. That’s when they inject their venom.
Most spiders wouldn’t even bother doing that to a human, mainly because we taste like crap,
and anyway, we are just too big, and our skin is too thick for them to really do
any significant damage. In the UK, when bananas aren’t carrying venomous spiders
into people’s kitchens, only about 6 species of spiders have big enough mouths and fangs to
deliver a venomous bite. If they were bigger, though, well, Houston, we have a problem…and
we are talking about a serious problem. In 1995, a famous arachnologist named
Norman Platnick scared the world when he wrote that humans are never more than a few yards from
a spider, wherever they are. After that, a gazillion articles came out saying people
are never more than three feet away from a spider. But that wasn’t exactly true.
If you’re in your garden or walking through the woods or in a field,
you are literally surrounded by them. They’ll be under your feet and marching all around you,
but if you’re in a parking lot or a shopping mall, the nearest spider might be quite a bit
farther than three feet away. Still, it is true that just about anywhere you go, you are probably
very close to not just one spider, but many. We can’t say how many spiders there are in
the world. Some species we won’t even have discovered yet. Nonetheless, one study said
there are quadrillions of spiders in the world. That is millions of billions of them. So yes,
you’ll have some in your house, and you’ll have armies in your garden, and if you got
up and walked down the street, you’d be walking in a veritable spider city. Millions of billions
mean they outnumber humans by a long, long way. That’s exactly what goes through Pete’s mind as
he watches the news on the TV and can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. He’s just watched a
reality show featuring spiders, and now the damn news is talking about spiders. What a
day! The anchor is visibly shaken as he reads the “just in” announcement. To the right of
his head is an image of a giant spider and people in the street running away from it.
Pete checks to see if he’s watching Fox News or MSNBC. He’s not, this is a serious news
channel. The anchor says, “Never before in human history has this been seen. Spiders,
as large as people, are on the rampage, not just in the US but all over the world. President Biden
tweeted a moment ago, ‘Terrible scene in Milwaukee this morning #spiderapocalyse.’”
The anchor says that scientists are currently trying to understand the phenomenon, but so far,
any rational explanation is beyond all understanding. Some have hypothesized
that chemical pollution could have caused some kind of genetic mutation, but even that seems
highly unlikely. Still, that seems the most reasonable hypothesis since it’s believed these
new giant spiders are born this big. They are a new, bigger generation of spider, rather than
older spiders having just shot up in size. So far, it looks like any species can be affected.
Even in the days of dinosaurs, explains the anchor, spiders weren’t this big. The largest in
the fossil record was found in China not long ago, and that only had a leg span of about 5 inches.
Bigger things that looked like spiders have been found in
fossils, but it later turned out they weren’t spiders but aquatic animals.
The news anchor finishes, “More on this story as news comes in. For now,
police are urging the public not to leave the house. Stay safe, folks.”
Cissy just laughs. She thinks it's some kind of prank, like an April Fools-type joke. She tells
Pete that there’s just no way spiders could suddenly grow to the size of humans. She is,
after all, a scientific materialist, and her background in biology tells her that there is
no possible way that any animal’s offspring could be born to such giant proportions and that this
could happen to various species all at once all around the globe. She just doesn’t believe it.
Pete looks at her with possibly the most serious expression that he’s ever pulled.
This is literally his living nightmare. He doesn’t want to believe it’s true,
but why would the news just lie? He tells Cissy, “If we really want the truth, there’s only one
place we can find it.” Cissy nods her head. She knows exactly what he’s talking about.
A minute later, they’ve cracked open Pete’s laptop and are typing inside a YouTube search box. “They
have fact-checkers for this kind of thing,” says Pete, just as an algorithmic recommendation for
“REAL polar bear Vs. gorilla fight” video pops up at the side of another video titled,
“SCARY: Teddy Bears can now Spread RABIES.” Pete ignores those and types into the search box,
“Giant spider, US, attack.” Cissy has found something after doing a Google search on her
computer. Listen to this, she tells Pete, “Female spiders produce either one egg sac
containing several to a thousand eggs or several egg sacs each with successively fewer eggs.”
Pete thinks about how long it would take for giant spiders to take over. Right now,
he’s about to choose from one of scores of videos that apparently
feature attacks in houses and in the streets. He hits play on one. It starts with a guy,
apparently in California like Pete and Cissy, who looks into the camera and says he can’t believe
what he’s seeing. He then turns the phone around, and shows the camera what looks like a colossal
house spider is carrying an old guy around between his jaws. The guy is screaming like
crazy but then just goes quiet all of a sudden. Pete clicks on other videos. They’re all similar,
full of people running down streets, running out of their houses, and in some of them,
cars crashing as they try to swerve out of the way of huge spiders of all types. One shows a group of
school children stuck in a large web with a spider slowly walking in their direction.
Another video at a gas station looks like it's straight out of the movie “Eight-legged Freaks.”
They’re incredibly fast. They can easily pick people off. Even the timidest of spiders now
has the capacity to rip someone’s head right off. What used to be so little venom that it
hardly would cause a human to notice is now potent enough to kill someone in a matter of seconds.
Nowhere is safe. Even the larger spiders can get into the smallest spaces. Jumping spiders seem to
be everywhere, too. One second they aren’t there, and then POW, they’re right in front of people.
These things used to be fuzzy and cute and so tiny no one ever cared
about them. Now they are jumping over buildings with ease. They seem to be
able to see things way off in the distance, and then they just leap
and catch the running human in their mouths. It looks as though they can jump something like
150 feet! So with big fangs and binocular eyes and amazing athleticism, they’re just as dangerous as
any kind of spider. In fact, it seems to Pete that every single species is now a killing machine.
“This is a massacre,” Pete tells Cissy, who now completely believes they are in danger. Just then,
she looks to the side. She screams to Pete, “Get down!” A huge black
widow is scraping their house window with its feet, which are now the size of human shoes.
Pete is well aware that black widows are comb-footed spiders. He can see
this one’s hairy legs. He knows that from those bristles, it could easily produce
some silk in which to entomb him and Cissy until it decides to come back and eat them.
Even more disturbing, outside in the street, three giant tarantulas march by.
Pete knows they are found in LA only because Kim Kardashian saw some in her garden not long ago.
It’s not nighttime yet, so it’s unusual for tarantulas to go out hunting,
but the size change might have changed their habits. They are good hunters,
too, employing the ambush tactic since they don’t make webs. These new giant ones must
have incredibly powerful jaws (chelicerae), powerful enough to crush a human. And anyway,
even if the human initially doesn’t die from being crushed, the venom will paralyze them anyway.
Just then, as Cissy knocks over a book that falls onto the hardwood floor, Pete sees the
thousands of hairs on the tarantula’s legs stand on end. They can detect the slightest
vibration. “Don’t move at all,” Pete tells Cissy. They both decide to do the sensible thing. That
is, to get as much water and food as possible and go into one room. First, they block every
door in the house. They put their wardrobes and beds up against the windows. A spider will have
to fight to get in this house, thinks Cissy. She’s right, but how long can they hold out?
The next day they watch the news and hear about what’s going on in the world. Some people have
tried to fight the spiders, but it hasn’t worked out. One guy in England is shown in a video
ripping off his t-shirt and walking towards what used to be called a Giant House Spider.
“C’mon! C’mon! Let’s ‘ave it,” shouts the guy, as he walks forward wielding what looks like a
machete. The spider flies at him so fast that you can only see a blur. When they were normal size,
these things could run half a meter per second. Now they are
like rockets. Half of the guy is stuffed in the spider’s mouth in no time at all.
All spiders are different, but if you take into account the proportions when spiders were their
regular size, some of them were around 250 times stronger than a human. Darwin's bark
spider could spin silk that was 10 times as strong as Kevlar. Now all the giant web-spinning spiders
can wrap up anything, it seems, even tanks. That actually happened when the US military
sent tanks into the streets of New York City. They were soon all stationary, covered in thick
silk. This stuff is now like insanely strong rope, five times stronger than steel, and the spiders
can wrap things up so damn fast. The average web takes about an hour to build, but man,
these new giant webs are something to behold. Some spiders can lift about 160 times their
own body weight, so if we say the human-sized ones are about 100kg, that may give them the ability to
lift 16,000 kg. That’s actually about the weight of two tanks or three African elephants. Ok,
so no one knows the exact math, but people can see that giant spiders are incredibly strong.
This is how some spiders have managed to knock down house walls. Now that humans are
mostly all hiding, the spiders don’t have much choice. Humans are the most plentiful source
of food. No longer will a housefly be enough of meal for a spider, but dogs and cats and
cattle are fair game. One video on YouTube shows the aftermath of an industrial farm.
Hundreds of cows are dead, some still being eaten by just as many spiders. Let’s just remember here
that when spiders were all small, they still ate an estimated 725 million tons of insects
every year! Now humans have replaced insects, and the spiders need much more
food than before to power their large bodies. That’s a lot of dead bodies. It’s basically the
entire human race. In fact, it was estimated a few years ago that the entire human race weighs
about 316 million tons, so if all spiders become giants, the entire human race won’t last them
half a year. Thank God for the cattle, pets, and other wild animals, but things don’t look good.
“At least I don’t feel silly now about having an irrational fear,” Pete says to
Cissy as they sit huddled in the corner of the kitchen. A pot of pasta is on the boil.
They have perhaps about four days of food left. After that, they’re not sure what they will do.
They’ve heard things mentioned on the news about heavy artillery, missiles, and airstrikes,
about nuclear weapons, but the spiders are literally everywhere, and so killing them
means killing a lot of humans, and we are talking about getting rid of a significant
part of the human race. Chemical weapons have also been discussed, but again, the loss of
human life would be catastrophic with a capital C. Most of the wealthiest people; the world leaders,
kings, and queens, are all safe in underground bunkers. “It’s for
the greater good,” they tell the public. They can stay there for years if need be.
Most cities in the world still have electricity. Many people still have the internet. But for
how long, no one knows. Cissy is using the internet when she pulls up an article written
in 2017 by The Washington Post. The title is “Spiders could theoretically eat every
human on Earth in one year.” The first paragraph goes:
“Spiders are quite literally all around us. A recent entomological
survey of North Carolina homes turned up spiders in 100 percent of them,
including 68 percent of bathrooms and more than three-quarters of bedrooms.”
Those were the normal size ones, who ate 10 times their body weight every day, or most did at least.
It’s just good luck then that no giant ones have yet been born in Pete and Cissy’s house. Then
right at that moment, they hear a crashing sound from upstairs. It sounds like pictures are falling
off walls and glass is breaking. Then they hear, THUMP, THUMP,
THUMP…Silence…Suddenly a hairy leg smashes through the kitchen door,
soon followed by a head with eight eyes. It’s a Wolf Spider, and it looks hungry.
Pete and Cissy are going to die. Everyone in the world is going to die. If spiders were
human-size, we wouldn’t have a chance. Now you need to watch this other animal
horror show, “Why You Wouldn't Survive A Town Full of Ants.” Or,
get down with some real-life content in “I Was Swarmed By Fire Ants And Survived (True Story).”