10 ms·

Number 16 (spider)

327 points by histories 2y ago

serf 2y ago
it's neat that the spider outlasted the arachnologist's career. I wonder how long it would have lived without the wasps' interference.
egypturnash 2y ago
Forty-three years. That’s a long time to be a spider.
- throwanem 2y ago
  It's a long time to be a human, come to that.
- Bonolio 2y ago
  One has to consider that if the longest lived spider ever, is one out of possible millions, chosen for a particular study, that maybe 43 years isn't actually that long for a spider. It seems unlikely that at random they just happened to choose the spider that would live longer than them all.
  - sdenton4 2y ago
    Black widow spiders last something like a thousand eggs, and the hatchlings murder and easy one another until only a couple survive... Who go in to live for as long as black widows live for. The average lifespan is likely quite low, however.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Very few people seem to be able to distinguish between "the largest number on record" and "the largest thing that ever happened", even if they know perfectly well that records of whatever the phenomenon is are never kept.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Can't they make different studies to determine age? We know that some turtles, sharks and whales can live way more than a century if not multiple centuries, but we don't know that because we have been following them from centuries. There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet. We have a picture of it dating 1886: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan_and_another_tortoise%2C_St_Helena.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan...
    - rdlw 2y ago
      > There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet. Is this just a fancy way to say that the tortoise is alive, and whoever was governor in 1882 is dead?
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        No, actually it is saying that every governor since 1882 (except, by implication of “yet”, the current one implied to exist) is also dead, not just that the 1882 governor is dead. Of course, in the limit case if there were no governors after 1882 (except the current one, if any) it would just say the one in 1882 was dead, but there were, in fact, 24 or 25, depending on exactly when in 1882 the tortoise arrived (not sure on that), subsequent governors before the position was abolished with home rule which quickly transitioned into independence. Which makes the “yet” weird, but I suppose it admits the possibility that the office might be restored before the tortoise dies, and the tortoise might not outlive the potential future governor.
        rdlw 2y ago
        Sure, the "yet" seemed to imply that one governor has taken over. There's no further information regarding the number of governors, and I refrained from speculation. All I could deduce was that the 1882 governor is dead, the current one is alive, and there is a nonnegative whole number of intervening governors (zero or more).
  - egypturnash 2y ago
    Imagine the life of a spider. Imagine it for forty three years. Lurking in your burrow, waiting for a snack to wander by. Getting fucked by spider boys and maybe eating them. Do trapdoor spiders eat their mates? I’m not sure. Laying eggs and watching the spiderlings go running off. Again and again for forty three years. That just feels like a long time to be a spider.
- ErneX 2y ago
  And it was killed, who knows for how long it could have lived.
  - pvaldes 2y ago
    In my opinion, the logical assumption is that this spider species can't live for much more time than exactly that interval of time The interesting point here to me is that it was not killed before. This suggests that it was able to fend off the wasps attacks for fourty years. I assume that hen died it was too weak (too old) to fight back. Another possibility is that it had moult recently and was too soft to defend itself. Insects die soon because adult wings can't moult twice. Spiders don't have wings so they can moult indefinitely and became much much older than insects --but-- is easy to predict that (unlike jellyfishes), spiders can't live forever We can be 100% sure of this empirically. We even could predict mathematically the life time span of each species, also if we would want it (again, in my opinion).
bentcorner 2y ago
While we're talking spiders, here's a book recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) (it's a fantastic novel, if you have any interest at all don't spoil it for yourself)
- riffraff 2y ago
  I second this, I cannot recommend this enough. The sequels are also interesting, but not so much.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Strong second.
- jasonkester 2y ago
  Yeah, it’s got a bit of that “sci-fi books that HN recommends “ syndrome in that it’s a cool idea for a book but not actually a good book. More interesting to have described to you by someone who has read it than to read. But probably worth forcing your way through the poor writing, character building and storytelling to get those cool ideas out of it. It’s a good book to have read, but not to read, I guess. Sadly, the second one squanders an even more interesting concept, and isn’t worth reading.
  - hakfoo 2y ago
    I found the pacing a bit difficult, like they got 500 pages in and realized "okay, we've gotta wrap this up in a hurry".
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > it’s a cool idea for a book but not actually a good book This was my impression of K. J. Parker's work. (I read the Scavenger trilogy of his.) Intricate idea, uninteresting writing.
  - shirleyquirk 2y ago
    I’m so glad to hear you say that, i was carrying it around while slogging through it and everyone else who saw exclaimed how good they’d heard it was. I do think the sequel is better, I can suspend my disbelief more and found parts of it honestly thrilling
foobiekr 2y ago
The final sentence is very sad. Fuck Alzheimer’s.
- epolanski 2y ago
  A neighbor of mine went from the most brilliant and kindest person I've ever met, to not recognizing his own wife at home in a short time span of few months. The fact that he would not recognize me after talking together every week for a decade felt slightly odd. But what broke the camel's straw was after one morning he assaulted his own wife coming back with groceries thinking she was an intruder. Living 50 years together and not remembering her at all was awful. Broke her and his heart too when he had to be taken to a proper elderly care facility as he was too dangerous (70+ but still very fit and strong) to his own family. Obviously, luck wanted that he was lucid when they were taking him out the house. He was aware of what was happening and why for few minutes. But when it came to say goodbye it felt like Shutter Island finale, you couldn't say whether he was now faking a few moments later or if he was doing it because aware of his condition and danger.
- rc_mob 2y ago
  the spider is forever alive in her heart
happytoexplain 2y ago
>For her 40th birthday, research assistant Leanda Mason wanted to give the spider a mealworm, but Main denied the request since it would interfere with the study. I have to admire the level of professionalism it takes to not give a single mealworm to a spider you have been watching for forty years.
- EugeneOZ 2y ago
  They also didn't give her a name - she remained “#16”, without any pet name.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Nor should they have. Instead, they behaved respectfully.
    - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
      What would be disrespectful about calling her Brenda for example ?
      - aa-jv 2y ago
        The potential for confusion when documenting the work in any scientific papers.
        martin293 2y ago
        How does that have amything to do with disrespect?
        aa-jv 2y ago
        Not having respect for the scientific process, where using loaded or ambiguous labels introduces culture where only raw technical facts are required.
janalsncm 2y ago
What amazes me about spiders is their complex unlearned behavior. No trapdoor spider learns how to build a trap. No orb weaver learns how to spin a web. Trap/web building behavior is entirely programmed in their DNA. I think about this a lot in the context of conversations about intelligence. If spiders can have complex behaviors hard-coded, humans certainly do too. (In other words, the Tabula Rasa theory is wrong.) The ability to learn language and emotion are certainly two examples. We are pretty good at certain things (learning language, picking up social cues) and relatively bad at others (calculating an 18% tip). So if you’re going to measure “intelligence” the first thing you’ll need to do is choose what to measure. What questions do you ask? You might be inclined to pick things we humans think are important. But then that’s not an objective universal measurement, at best it’s yardstick for human cognitive abilities.
- ggm 2y ago
  They don't just build one. You may mean they don't learn from observation of others or from their mother. They may still acquire a sense of a better trapdoor and make better trap doors by experience. I can't think of an experiment to test the theory, but it might be around qualities like "thickness" or "wind resistance" if you could make a condition of test which put the trapdoor they do un-biassed under specific stresses.
  - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
    Still, even if that's true, it does not refute the point. The knowledge necessary to build the very first burrow or web, or trapdoor (which will be definitely more than good enough otherwise spiders would no longer exist) is hardcoded, not externally acquired.
    - kid64 2y ago
      Isn't virtually all behavior of non-humans driven by instinct? Our learned behavior seems way more unlikely and amazing.
      - 2y ago
jonahx 2y ago
> Because of Number 16, Main's project took far longer than she had expected. She continued to work into her late 80s, but she "began to look forward to the project's end" Reminded me of The Onion's "Expert Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk
junon 2y ago
> Australian arachnologist Barbara York Main ... returned to the site annually, sometimes more frequently, for more than four decades. Huge respect. Always amazed by scientists sticking with studies like that.
brap 2y ago
I wonder what it’s like living life idle 99% of the time. Do spiders get bored?
- optimalsolver 2y ago
  You may be interested in this discussion: "Imagining the psychology of aliens evolved from ambush predators" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/imagining_the_psychology_of_aliens_evolved_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/ima...
disagree123 2y ago
Rarely do I see a wikipedia post here that actually is new and interesting to me. Thanks!
- zeigotaro 2y ago
  This was also posted on depthsofwikipedia on IG, which, if you haven't checked out, is quite the rabbit hole. Highly recommended.
Miraltar 2y ago
The longest-lived spider: mygalomorphs dig deep, and persevere Research article reporting the spider's death by Leanda Denise Mason, Grant Wardell-Johnson and Barbara York Main https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.publish.csiro.au%2Fpc%2FFulltext%2FPC18015#federation=archive.wikiwix.com&tab=url https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...

327 points by histories 2y ago

serf 2y ago

it's neat that the spider outlasted the arachnologist's career. I wonder how long it would have lived without the wasps' interference.

egypturnash 2y ago

Forty-three years. That’s a long time to be a spider.

throwanem 2y ago
It's a long time to be a human, come to that.
Bonolio 2y ago
One has to consider that if the longest lived spider ever, is one out of possible millions, chosen for a particular study, that maybe 43 years isn't actually that long for a spider. It seems unlikely that at random they just happened to choose the spider that would live longer than them all.
- sdenton4 2y ago
  Black widow spiders last something like a thousand eggs, and the hatchlings murder and easy one another until only a couple survive... Who go in to live for as long as black widows live for. The average lifespan is likely quite low, however.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Very few people seem to be able to distinguish between "the largest number on record" and "the largest thing that ever happened", even if they know perfectly well that records of whatever the phenomenon is are never kept.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Can't they make different studies to determine age? We know that some turtles, sharks and whales can live way more than a century if not multiple centuries, but we don't know that because we have been following them from centuries. There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet. We have a picture of it dating 1886: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan_and_another_tortoise%2C_St_Helena.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan...
  - rdlw 2y ago
    > There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet. Is this just a fancy way to say that the tortoise is alive, and whoever was governor in 1882 is dead?
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      No, actually it is saying that every governor since 1882 (except, by implication of “yet”, the current one implied to exist) is also dead, not just that the 1882 governor is dead. Of course, in the limit case if there were no governors after 1882 (except the current one, if any) it would just say the one in 1882 was dead, but there were, in fact, 24 or 25, depending on exactly when in 1882 the tortoise arrived (not sure on that), subsequent governors before the position was abolished with home rule which quickly transitioned into independence. Which makes the “yet” weird, but I suppose it admits the possibility that the office might be restored before the tortoise dies, and the tortoise might not outlive the potential future governor.
      - rdlw 2y ago
        Sure, the "yet" seemed to imply that one governor has taken over. There's no further information regarding the number of governors, and I refrained from speculation. All I could deduce was that the 1882 governor is dead, the current one is alive, and there is a nonnegative whole number of intervening governors (zero or more).
- egypturnash 2y ago
  Imagine the life of a spider. Imagine it for forty three years. Lurking in your burrow, waiting for a snack to wander by. Getting fucked by spider boys and maybe eating them. Do trapdoor spiders eat their mates? I’m not sure. Laying eggs and watching the spiderlings go running off. Again and again for forty three years. That just feels like a long time to be a spider.
ErneX 2y ago
And it was killed, who knows for how long it could have lived.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  In my opinion, the logical assumption is that this spider species can't live for much more time than exactly that interval of time The interesting point here to me is that it was not killed before. This suggests that it was able to fend off the wasps attacks for fourty years. I assume that hen died it was too weak (too old) to fight back. Another possibility is that it had moult recently and was too soft to defend itself. Insects die soon because adult wings can't moult twice. Spiders don't have wings so they can moult indefinitely and became much much older than insects --but-- is easy to predict that (unlike jellyfishes), spiders can't live forever We can be 100% sure of this empirically. We even could predict mathematically the life time span of each species, also if we would want it (again, in my opinion).

bentcorner 2y ago

While we're talking spiders, here's a book recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) (it's a fantastic novel, if you have any interest at all don't spoil it for yourself)

riffraff 2y ago
I second this, I cannot recommend this enough. The sequels are also interesting, but not so much.
throwanem 2y ago
Strong second.
jasonkester 2y ago
Yeah, it’s got a bit of that “sci-fi books that HN recommends “ syndrome in that it’s a cool idea for a book but not actually a good book. More interesting to have described to you by someone who has read it than to read. But probably worth forcing your way through the poor writing, character building and storytelling to get those cool ideas out of it. It’s a good book to have read, but not to read, I guess. Sadly, the second one squanders an even more interesting concept, and isn’t worth reading.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  I found the pacing a bit difficult, like they got 500 pages in and realized "okay, we've gotta wrap this up in a hurry".
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > it’s a cool idea for a book but not actually a good book This was my impression of K. J. Parker's work. (I read the Scavenger trilogy of his.) Intricate idea, uninteresting writing.
- shirleyquirk 2y ago
  I’m so glad to hear you say that, i was carrying it around while slogging through it and everyone else who saw exclaimed how good they’d heard it was. I do think the sequel is better, I can suspend my disbelief more and found parts of it honestly thrilling

foobiekr 2y ago

The final sentence is very sad. Fuck Alzheimer’s.

epolanski 2y ago
A neighbor of mine went from the most brilliant and kindest person I've ever met, to not recognizing his own wife at home in a short time span of few months. The fact that he would not recognize me after talking together every week for a decade felt slightly odd. But what broke the camel's straw was after one morning he assaulted his own wife coming back with groceries thinking she was an intruder. Living 50 years together and not remembering her at all was awful. Broke her and his heart too when he had to be taken to a proper elderly care facility as he was too dangerous (70+ but still very fit and strong) to his own family. Obviously, luck wanted that he was lucid when they were taking him out the house. He was aware of what was happening and why for few minutes. But when it came to say goodbye it felt like Shutter Island finale, you couldn't say whether he was now faking a few moments later or if he was doing it because aware of his condition and danger.
rc_mob 2y ago
the spider is forever alive in her heart

happytoexplain 2y ago

>For her 40th birthday, research assistant Leanda Mason wanted to give the spider a mealworm, but Main denied the request since it would interfere with the study. I have to admire the level of professionalism it takes to not give a single mealworm to a spider you have been watching for forty years.

EugeneOZ 2y ago
They also didn't give her a name - she remained “#16”, without any pet name.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Nor should they have. Instead, they behaved respectfully.
  - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
    What would be disrespectful about calling her Brenda for example ?
    - aa-jv 2y ago
      The potential for confusion when documenting the work in any scientific papers.
      - martin293 2y ago
        How does that have amything to do with disrespect?
        aa-jv 2y ago
        Not having respect for the scientific process, where using loaded or ambiguous labels introduces culture where only raw technical facts are required.

janalsncm 2y ago

What amazes me about spiders is their complex unlearned behavior. No trapdoor spider learns how to build a trap. No orb weaver learns how to spin a web. Trap/web building behavior is entirely programmed in their DNA. I think about this a lot in the context of conversations about intelligence. If spiders can have complex behaviors hard-coded, humans certainly do too. (In other words, the Tabula Rasa theory is wrong.) The ability to learn language and emotion are certainly two examples. We are pretty good at certain things (learning language, picking up social cues) and relatively bad at others (calculating an 18% tip). So if you’re going to measure “intelligence” the first thing you’ll need to do is choose what to measure. What questions do you ask? You might be inclined to pick things we humans think are important. But then that’s not an objective universal measurement, at best it’s yardstick for human cognitive abilities.

ggm 2y ago
They don't just build one. You may mean they don't learn from observation of others or from their mother. They may still acquire a sense of a better trapdoor and make better trap doors by experience. I can't think of an experiment to test the theory, but it might be around qualities like "thickness" or "wind resistance" if you could make a condition of test which put the trapdoor they do un-biassed under specific stresses.
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  Still, even if that's true, it does not refute the point. The knowledge necessary to build the very first burrow or web, or trapdoor (which will be definitely more than good enough otherwise spiders would no longer exist) is hardcoded, not externally acquired.
  - kid64 2y ago
    Isn't virtually all behavior of non-humans driven by instinct? Our learned behavior seems way more unlikely and amazing.
    - 2y ago

jonahx 2y ago

> Because of Number 16, Main's project took far longer than she had expected. She continued to work into her late 80s, but she "began to look forward to the project's end" Reminded me of The Onion's "Expert Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk

junon 2y ago

> Australian arachnologist Barbara York Main ... returned to the site annually, sometimes more frequently, for more than four decades. Huge respect. Always amazed by scientists sticking with studies like that.

brap 2y ago

I wonder what it’s like living life idle 99% of the time. Do spiders get bored?

optimalsolver 2y ago
You may be interested in this discussion: "Imagining the psychology of aliens evolved from ambush predators" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/imagining_the_psychology_of_aliens_evolved_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/ima...

disagree123 2y ago

Rarely do I see a wikipedia post here that actually is new and interesting to me. Thanks!

zeigotaro 2y ago
This was also posted on depthsofwikipedia on IG, which, if you haven't checked out, is quite the rabbit hole. Highly recommended.

Miraltar 2y ago

The longest-lived spider: mygalomorphs dig deep, and persevere Research article reporting the spider's death by Leanda Denise Mason, Grant Wardell-Johnson and Barbara York Main https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.publish.csiro.au%2Fpc%2FFulltext%2FPC18015#federation=archive.wikiwix.com&tab=url https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...