"I think there are so many spiders here..." Said Alistair McGregor casually, as he turned his hand to grab a woman who was trying to break free of his plump body and slender legs. However, we can never have too many spiders because they will eat each other's own kind. "
We stood in his Oxford University laboratory spider breeding room, home to more than 10,000 American spiders and a group of other restless animals from centipedes to tarantulas, and to simulate the dark corners where these creatures like to sneak in, the indoor air was deliberately moldy, and the walls were lined with bookshelves lined with rows of glass jars, containers, and petri dishes.
"Sometimes, crickets will run out and we can hear them in the hallway," McGregor said with a grin, immediately adding that no spider had ever escaped. (His students later told me, though, that spider escapes are also common.)
The lab door was rather bulky, a bit like the hatch of a submarine. The door was old and sometimes stuck, and his students would be trapped inside.
The American spider is one of the most common spiders in North America
Keeping an eye on the exit of the lab, I picked up a jar and looked inside. A spider was lying in a silver silk web, its eight long legs sticking out from under its rounded torso. It was bulky and looked more like it had been pressed against the body by a piece of marble. "Usually, there's a male spider in there, too, but she must have eaten him," McGregor said.
Some spiders can hear people entering the room through their fluff. Some will disguise the body as a leaf, much like it. At least 18 species of spiders swim and prey on fish, while the brown-skinned flower spider has a powerful venom that breaks down its flesh (and likes to hide under sheets and shoes).
McGregor's greenhouse spider (Parasteatodatepidariorum) has only skills of weaving ugly-looking three-dimensional spider webs. "Greenhouse spiders evolved a little later than those that weave symmetrical webs," he explains, as if that could be an excuse for them to some extent. The creepy silk thread that hangs from the chandelier in horror movies is the work of the greenhouse Spider.
The American spider is ecologically similar to humans. Although they can survive in the wild, they prefer to live with people
Nevertheless, they should not be underestimated. The most common spider in North America is a master of insect predation, and it is common to see individual domestic spiders dragging the remains of their prey into their webs and hiding them. When they find prey to prey, they spit out more silks at the victim and drag the prey into their mouths through these wires. They then suck up the bodily fluids of their prey, leaving only an empty shell.
McGregor's spider, though, wasn't placed here to scare reporters. In recent years, scientists have begun to seek to shed their long-standing reliance on certain kinds of animal "stars" for medical research, such as flies and mice. Instead, he began to do research with some novel creatures, including microbes that are almost invincible in the world, and fish that can be hunted on land.
Perhaps, soon spiders will also become the subject of medical research. In fact, spiders are ideal for studying objects. There are two reasons for this. First, spiders share a genetic secret with humans.
Although the evolution of humans and spiders are 800 million years apart, and spiders do not even have a normal heartbeat, it is surprising that spiders have a lot of similarities with humans. For example, we have long known that spiders form four pairs of round eyes through the exact same gene As humans, Pax-6. Take this ancient gene from the human body and replace it with the spider's gene, and the real-life version of spider-man created by people will grow normal human eyes.
According to a survey of North Carolina households, 68 percent have spiders in their bathrooms, and more than three-quarters of their bedrooms have spiders
Of course, many animals, such as mice (90 percent genetically identical to humans) and cattle (80 percent genetically identical to humans), are more "human."
However, spiders have an absolute advantage. Looking back at their evolutionary history, an ancient spider accidentally gave birth to a small spider with two sets of genetic instructions, rather than just one set of genetic instructions. That's a big deal. This happens all the time in the plant kingdom, but it has only happened five times in the entire evolutionary history of the animal kingdom. Two of these occurred in distant ancestors of vertebrates, including humans.
On the surface, having an extra set of backup genes seems like a very, very bad thing. After all, Down's syndrome is caused by an extra chromosome. However, this is an important driver of evolution. While the first set continues to maintain its original function, the second set of backup genes is free to play a new role. It was this set of backup genes that helped the early ancestors of vertebrates evolve cartilage-like soft tissues into bones.
By studying spiders, McGregor's team learned more about the consequences of such rare events. This leads to the second important reason for spiders. Many of these excess genes play an important role in early development. To study their role, scientists need embryos.
The brown-skinned flower spider has a venom that breaks down the flesh and likes to hide it in its shoes
You know, spiders are invincible. People with athnophobia may want to skip the next paragraph unless they want to know that a female spider can produce 400 eggs every five days. The eggs are so transparent that scientists can observe the embryo's development without killing them.
In order to ensure a sustainable supply, McGregor's laboratory is basically engaged in the breeding of spiders. In the beginning, it was just a silk cocoon woven by a female spider waiting to be laid in the early hours of the morning, and the eggs were fertilized at the time of laying (unlike the spiders that it insferred in the ovaries), so the development stage of each egg is exactly the same, which is very useful for scientists.
Each egg cocoon has its own Petri dish, which they are to develop in for 10 days. When it first came out, the juvenile spider did not move, had no hair on its body and was transparent, but there was a hint of red in its eyes.
But, after a few days, they will look like their eerie parents. The larvae began to crawl around, spit silk and eat their brothers and sisters, and the petri dish became a furry, crawling mess.
From this point on, it began to become cunning and alert. They feed on each other, but that's fine, people don't have to feed. As a result of this survival mechanism, each vessel ends up with only a very fat spider. Among them, a small number of survivors will be separated and each will live in their own area.
Together, spiders around the world swallow between 400 million and 800 million metric tons of prey each year, more than the combined weight of humans on Earth
Since then, they will start feeding on flies and crickets. Flies are handy, and the other half of McGregor's lab studies fruit flies, while crickets come from pet stores. Slowly, after several rounds of growth and shedding their hard shells, they will grow 9 centimeters long and begin to mate.
My master was carefully observing a small bottle containing a spider. "I was wondering, are they mating, or is she going to eat him?" McGregor said. In the wild, seekers often run away after mating (unlike the red male widow spider, which repeatedly sends themselves to their girlfriend's mouth and forces them to eat themselves). However, in such an enclosed space, they are difficult to survive. Fortunately, most spiders only need to mate once.
Today, McGregor raises this nest of 10 to 20 descendants of spiders collected from Göttingen, Germany. "When scientists make reports, they like to slide about where they collect animals, usually beautiful islands and beaches," he says. "
Many people think that long-legged spiders are poisonous, but their poisonous fangs cannot penetrate human skin. The opposite is true: they are non-toxic, but they can pierce a person's skin
Although spiders have only been studied for less than a decade, promising progress has been made in the study of so-called "gene duplication." One example of this is the kneecap.
A team of scientists at georg-August-University of Göttingen wanted to figure out why some spiders have shorter legs and others have eerie slender legs. They found the answer in genes: the Dachshund gene. The gene takes its name from the short-legged Dax Hound.
The scientists compared two groups of common house spiders, the American home spider and the long-legged spider. The name of the long-legged spider is very vivid, and it has extremely exaggerated long legs that frighten people with arachnophobia around the world. Scientists tried to find differences in genes, however, and found nothing.
Instead, surprisingly, both spiders have a superfluous gene. To figure out what this gene does, scientists took it from an American spider embryo. The knees of those mutant spiders have merged with the legs to become part of the legs, and they no longer have kneecaps. The limb structures that allow spiders to traverse bathroom floors or dexterously crawl through sticky cobwebs are due to an important evolutionary error.
In addition, breakthroughs have been made in other areas. Over the past few years, research on spiders has also provided clues to a range of problems, including heart disease and human aging. The protein found in spider venom may one day help people treat brain damage, muscle atrophy and even impotence.
(After knowing so much about spiders) I'd love to say I'll look at them differently... But really not, sorry, how the spider looks is eerie.
Friends, what do you think, please comment below!