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Don't get me wrong, I still find families of baby spiders to be absolutely terrifying in every way, and it takes every bit of my willpower to fight the urge to
by bryans 5y ago
Don't get me wrong, I still find families of baby spiders to be absolutely terrifying in every way, and it takes every bit of my willpower to fight the urge to remove them from existence. But at the end of the day, the key word is family. It's a group of living things, with parents that apparently have the emotional capacity to care about them.
Hopefully when you say "get rid of it," that means gently coaxing them into a box and putting them outside.
- poisonarena 5y agoYou are assuming very human or even mammalian qualities and constructs like "parents/family/emotion" to invertebrates that have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates. If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion.
- edumucelli 5y agoMany humans do that to other humans, so I do not see how different we are from them.
- marcellus23 5y agoOh come on.
- bryans 5y agoThe largest spiders are almost universally docile toward humans, so your own assumption doesn't really hold water.
- birksherty 5y agoNo species can come even close to humans in killing others without any hesitation. Have you even seen the documentary Earthlings? http://www.nationearth.com/ http://www.nationearth.com/
- Levitz 5y agoOh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem. Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No. Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
- AwaAwa 5y agoHuman industrial slaughter where animals are trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) would beg to differ. Or how about male chicks being liquefied and fed back to the chickens? Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter. This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
- kuraudoOishii 5y agoPlease drop the antisemitism
- phonypc 5y ago>trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) There is absolutely push/incentive to monitor and correct for failures in stunning. The stress response it entails in the animal makes for poor quality meat, or even inedible meat that would have to thrown out. Also, stunning is followed by slaughtering and draining. There is no situation in industrial production in which an animal would be dismembered and skinned alive.
- swayvil 5y agoForget the actual slaughter. They live their entire life in a torture cage, smeared in excrement, ears filled with the screams of their suffering family. We are clearly demons.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 5y ago> If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion. That's how predators act. Yet, we have no lack of love for birds and cats. Anyway, don't group spiders on the "have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates". They are much more complex than that. Besides some vertebrates also have no problem doing that.
- mellavora 5y agosorry, what? The claim that "parents/family/emotion" are constructs which are limited to (higher) mammals rests on the assumption that these constructs are dependent on i.e. a highly developed cerebral cortex-- and that somehow the cortex is the seat of emotions. Given that neurotransmitters (adrenaline?) are so instrumental to regulating emotional state, that claim seems highly unlikely. The most plausible possibility is that all multi-celled beings have some sense of family and parenthood. And here with the spiders you are presented with evidence of such. Does a mother spider feel distress with quite the same level of nuance as a mother human? Perhaps not. Is she clearly distressed? absolutely.
- bugzz 5y agoIf they had "no problem" cannibalizing their offspring, they'd quickly go extinct! In reality, cannibalizing of offspring only occurs in particular circumstances - if conditions are poor enough that most of the young won't survive anyway, for example. In which case their instincts kick in to cannibalize as a way to recoup the energy and try again at a better time. If conditions are right there will instead be a strong instinct to protect the egg sack / young.
- logicchains 5y agoHumans in desperate situations will do similar things, sacrificing their children for resources: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/asia/afghanistan-child-marriage-crisis-taliban-intl-hnk-dst/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/asia/afghanistan-child-ma...
- toss1 5y agoYes, and "Rugby players eat their dead" (true story, 1972 plane crash, subject of several books, etc. [1]) Just because you can't readily see the emotion, does not mean it is not there. True to say that 'we don't know if they regret having to eat their young/mates', but saying they don't care is just as much making assumptions as saying they do regret it, merely switching the polarity. It is also possible that eating the mate/being eaten is the most loving thing it can do, giving not only the DNA but also their entire stored energy for the good of the offspring. Or, they might be terrified. Or, they might not be sufficiently sentient to notice. Either way, what we know is that we don't know (tho there may be someone who's studied it enough, IDK). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571#Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571...
- Talanes 5y agoI've always heard that story as a soccer team, and I'm just now realizing it was probably because someone down the line didn't want to explain Rugby to Americans in the 70's.
- mym1990 5y agoYou’re Vin Diesel’s kinda person.
- cmsefton 5y agoIt's worth mentioning to check the species first before putting them back out. Some spiders are house spiders, and can't really survive outdoors. I generally put them into my garden shed or, if possible, into the loft instead, but most of the time, I just leave them alone.
- andai 5y agoI've always wondered about that, did they evolve after the invention of houses?
- cmsefton 5y agoMy knowledge on it is pretty basic, but as I understand, house spiders are adapted to living indoors: climate, food supply, and so forth. It's probable that over time spiders adapted to live in caves or tree hollows probably found it quite easy to move into dwellings, and stay there, to the extent that now some species have their entire life cycle based around dwellings. [Edit: I googled around, and this was an interesting article from Rod Crawford, the curator of arachnid collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Seattle talking about house spiders being traced back to Roman times. https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology/arachnology-and-entomology/spider-myths/myth-spiders-come-indoors https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology... ]
- jjk166 5y agoGenerally they can live just fine in the wild somewhere, and human indoor climates merely replicate their natural habitat. Odds are without shelter or clothing or other artificial methods of controlling temperature you'd be pretty screwed wherever you currently live too.
- praptak 5y agoNo, they evolved to become synanthropic. That's usually a good deal for a species unless humans change their ways. The black cellar beetle was very popular in Europe living in preindustrial era because it lived in wooden buildings and is now endangered because these buildings are becoming rare.