December 3, 2012 1:43 pm
Urbanization Is Supersizing Spiders
A female golden orb weaver spider. Photo: Arthur Chapman
City living brings with it a few shifts in lifestyle compared to rural habitation: shorter commutes, accessible shops and, often, an over-reliance on restaurant dining and fast food. Another side effect of the congested, cramped, cement-laded city life is that the temperature tends to be a little warmer year-round, a shift known as the “urban heat island” effect.
As it turns out, these changes aren’t only affecting cities’ human populations. In Australia, where spiders already have a propensity to be terrifyingly large, new research by University of Sydney PhD candidate Lizzy Lowe, says The Age, found that Sydney’s higher temperatures and easier access to food are driving the spiders to grow even bigger.
She studied the golden orb weaver in three types of environments in and around Sydney – urban parks, remnant bushland and continuous bushland. Twenty sites were studied and, for each spider web found, she assessed its proximity to man-made objects and vegetation.
Comparing the sizes of the spiders, she found that the city spiders outpaced the country spiders. And, though her research focused only on Golden orb weaver spiders, she suggests that the same effect can probably be seen in other species.
More from Smithsonian.com:
100-Million-Year-Old Spider Caught in the Act of Pouncing on Its Prey
Could Spider Venom Be a Viagra Stand-In?
Spiders “Under The Influence”
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
5 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Hmm, interesting..and a little scary. Wonder how much bigger the city spiders were to the country ones?
Comment by Gail W — December 5, 2012 @ 7:35 pm
Spiders becoming “Super-Sized” in the City? Of course! They have more junk fund at their disposal. One day in the not too distant future their bulk will increase to a extent that their legs will no longer be able to carry them. This will assuredly result being squashed by “Super-Sized” humans who in all likelihood won’t even notice. Extinction or return to the rural areas again like the “Prepers” are doing!
Comment by Peter M. Lutterbeck, M.D. — December 9, 2012 @ 10:10 am
Super-sized spiders inhabiting “cement-laded” cities? Does the writer mean bags of dehydrated powdered limestone? Or is he/she confusing cement (powder) with concrete (man-made rock made from cement, sand, gravel and water)? …and shouldn’t that “laded” really be “laden” or maybe even “laced?” I would kindly refer this scribe to an excellent article in The Smithsonian Magazine (ca 1994) where all of the secrets of cement/concrete are skillfully exposed.
Comment by Dave Churchman — December 9, 2012 @ 5:25 pm
While this is interesting, there should still be an upper limit to how large arthropods can get. The reason we lost the huge insects and spiders from ancient times is because levels of Oxygen in the atmosphere went down.
Comment by Cody — January 11, 2013 @ 3:55 pm
I will burn my house down and start anew if I see one of these.
Comment by moka — May 7, 2013 @ 6:34 am