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If a Spider Could Speak
Paperback
Series: If They Could Speak, Book 8
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 13 2025
Pages: 70
Weight: 0.23
Height: 0.15 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
She is a European garden spider, she has built her wheel of silk across your hedge, and before the frost comes she has a few things to say.
Her silk is stronger, weight for weight, than steel, and the silk of Darwin's bark spider in Madagascar is the toughest biological material ever tested. She explains how she builds a web in about an hour, why she eats it every evening, and what happened when scientists gave spiders caffeine and sent two of them, Arabella and Anita, into orbit on Skylab.
She introduces her cousins: Portia, the jumping spider that plans detours to reach its prey; the peacock spiders of Australia, whose males dance and drum for females that are quite prepared to eat them; the only spider that is mostly vegetarian; a spider that lives in a bubble of air under water; and another that lives on Mount Everest at up to 6,700 metres. She tells how Charles Darwin found thousands of tiny spiders landing on HMS Beagle sixty miles from land, and how scientists in Bristol discovered that ballooning spiders can ride on electricity.
Then come the stories people tell. Arachne, who out-wove a goddess. Anansi, the West African spider who bought all the world's stories. Robert the Bruce in his cave, Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet, the dancing cure for the tarantula's bite, and Charlotte's Web, the best-loved spider book of all. She sorts out which spiders really are dangerous (very few), why the daddy long-legs is not secretly the deadliest spider of all, and why you almost certainly do not swallow eight spiders a year in your sleep.
Funny, sharp and carefully researched, this book checks every fact and every quotation against real sources, and a closing section sets out what we know, what we don't, and the popular beliefs about spiders that turn out to be wrong.
If a Spider Could Speak is for curious readers of every age, including the ones who are a little bit afraid of spiders.
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