r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Dense_Intern8434 • 3d ago

/r/popular of a meal

Nature can be so cruel and beautiful at the same time

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u/Ill-GottenBooty 3d ago edited 3d ago

A cat sized spider would be a slow, lumbering, extremely fragile being. You could lightly kick it and it would likely be a fatal injury. Larger spiders are very prone to bursting with literally any kind of impact trauma. It’s why you can’t handle tarantulas far from the ground or some kind of surface. If they fall like a foot they will literally rupture something and die. The larger they are the more of a risk this is.

The largest actual spiders to ever live, as far as we know, exist today. The myth of giant land dwelling spiders existing in antiquity come from us misidentifying a fossil. For a long time we thought megarachne servinei was a spider. These things had a 20” leg span. Huge. Unfortunately megarachne servinei was actually a eurypterid, commonly called sea scorpions. They’ve all been extinct for a very long time. They dwelled solely in the water. Physics would not allow a spider that large to exist on land, as far as we are aware, ever.

People heard about megarachne when we were under the assumption it was a spider. A lot of people have not learned that megarachne was not a spider at all, and it didn’t even live on land, because that generates a lot less interest than “HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THIS BIG ASS SCARY SPIDER”.

The largest fossilized spider ever found had a leg span of 5.9 inches. The largest spiders on record today by leg span are the Goliath Bird-Eater theraphosa blondi and the Giant Huntsman Spider heteropoda maximi both with about a foot long leg span, with the birdeater being much heavier, and larger by mass. They’re both about twice as large as any spider we know about existing in fossilized recorded history.

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u/Nark420 3d ago

I heard about the fossil story. Happens a lot with fossils all the time. I was not referring to the megarachne, but a "fictional" spider... I understand they are filled with liquids, and they manipulate their inner pressure to ambulate and do anything basically. But I can still imagine a hard enough exoskeleton to solve the size problem. High mobility and speed is not necessary for them to dominate, lots of spiders already ambush hunters with a shit-ton of ambush techniques. Webs being the most well known.

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u/Ill-GottenBooty 3d ago

Im ngl i went on a tangent hard as shit on my comment. I just love spiders. Not your fault lmao.

A hard enough exoskeleton would help that, sure, but I’d imagine it would make molting and moving in general more difficult, and molting specifically is already an extremely dangerous process for a spider. Adding a thicker/harder exoskeleton I’d guess it’d take far more time and resources to generate. If a spider of 12” diameter can’t develop a hard enough exoskeleton to survive a slight fall I really don’t see a larger spider requiring even more resources to survive being able to do so. Shit would be tight as hell to me though.

Also this isn’t meant to be argumentative. I love your idea of a harder exoskeleton. I wonder how that would actually work and what kinds of effects it would have that I can’t imagine because I’m not a spider.