True Facts: Tarantulas

this episode sponsored by brilliant learn to think listen this episode is about tarantulas but I want you to know that this Cricket year could not give a flying well you'll see but let's start from the beginning these balls here are the developing eggs of an arachnid in the family they're a fasada otherwise known as a tarantula now tarantulas are spiders and spiders are arthropods and arthropods are built out of little Lego blocks segments that often repeat like a centipede do and look at that you can see the segments right there it's all rolled up in a ball but if you unrolled it it looks a bit like a bug version of a centipede all the segments in the back will fuse together to form the big butt part of the spider all the front segments also fuse together and become very leggy but right now this one's almost ready to hatch you can see Little Fangs and look he's not even born yet nears a five o'clock shadow when they hatch these little babies are tiny eggs with legs is what they call them they're very cute I mean look at the one on the left it's got straight up puppy dog eyes these babies have a lot of growing to do but for a tarantula growing is a whole thing they wear their skeletons on the outside fashion Choice the skeletons don't really grow so if they want to to get bigger they have to make a whole new one here let's watch a grown-up one do it now it does look a bit dead but what's happening is that it's grown a whole new version of what you see right there underneath what you see right there and now it's time to wriggle out of the old hairy onesie it's like if you wanted a mustache and had to grow it underneath your skin and then rip your face off or like an exorcism where you're both the demon and the possessed look at the back part there went full wrinkled testy after it's loosened up a bit the tarantula uses its new legs to push off its old body and look at all that stuff it had to rebuild all the way down to those little hairs and just to make it confusing they're not even cold hairs they're called seti and they're not like our hairs which don't do they can do all sorts of things you'll see this looks a bit like a muppet sex toy anyway after the Mode's done it must feel a little weird walking away from essentially your corpse and of course the way they walk is a whole thing they have an open circulatory system basically the tubes that come out the heart just end and dump blood into different parts of the body cavity blood goes back into the heart through slits on the heart itself so their bodies are sort of like a blood-filled demon stress ball and that's sort of how they move they squeeze blood into their legs to extend them and then they use muscles to pull them back a dead tarantula has no blood pressure so its legs curl in now at the end of their feets they got little Claws and they use them to climb on rough surfaces but look at that they can also climb on glass I know what you're thinking how the hell do they do that so it turns out they have these little hairy pads on their feets and if you look close they're like little feathers designed to spread out and make close contact with the microstructure of a surface the close contact creates tiny little attractive forces called vendorwalls forces and if you add up a whole bunch of those tiny forces you can hold on and you don't need any glue it's called dry adhesion but here's the thing when tarantulas walk on glass they leave behind these little Gooby Footprints doesn't look that dry to me and of course the science hippies can't leave something like that alone one team found silk in the footprints and they found these little things with holes in them on their feet so they said that must be where the silk comes from and so they published a paper saying that tarantulas cling to smooth surfaces by secreting silk from their feet some other scientists were like hold on there's silk everywhere how do you know they didn't just step in some ordinary butt silk and were walking around with it stuck to their shoe like toilet paper the second team covered a tarantula's butt with wax so there wasn't any stray silk when they redid the experiment there was no silk in the footprints and so they published a paper saying that tarantulas do not shoot silk from their legs burn and another group found that those City with holes in them were actually fluid-filled tubes used to sample incense chemicals so the footprints are sort of like leftovers from licking the ground the tarantula was fine they washed it off with a bit of warm water and it got a free butt waxing out of it hush now I know what you're thinking what about that Cricket the one that don't give up well we'll get to that in a minute after a brief message about our sponsor brilliant is a wonderful Hands-On way to learn science math and computer science they have thousands of lessons to choose from at levels ranging from beginner to expert you know science is sort of a long passive aggressive argument about everything spiders feed whether there's more than one universe who is the best Batman all right maybe not that one but brilliant helps ground you in the concepts you'll need to really appreciate these arguments brilliant doesn't just teach specific skills it teaches you how to be a better thinker there's courses in the scientific thinking where you can build your intuition about things like Gravity Light movement and heat if you want to go deeper you can take courses in Geometry or calculus to see how mathematical languages can describe and predict how the world around us behaves or there's courses in in computer science where you can start learning the building blocks of virtual worlds where I'm sure some virtual scientists will be arguing too to get started for free visit brilliant.org zayfrank or click on the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20 off brilliant's annual premium subscription I'm a fan and happy to have brilliant as a sponsor where were we oh right center Angela's feet may not make silk but their back bits certainly do and they're out there to be tapping all over the place they live in these Burrows that they line with silk sometimes it's a little hidey hole in the ground and sometimes it's up in a tree the silk I make isn't the sticky kind but all those threads that they leave outside their burrow are sort of an extension of their senses they got little hair things on their legs that can sense tiny vibrations so they can tell if something's snooping around well not that time you know this flies they can gram with their front legs and then hold on with these little arm-like things called pedapalps now right next to their mouth they've got a stubby little pair of Limbs called the calicity and that's where the fangs are and the fangs probably evolved from claws so the fangs are more like if you had little T-Rex hands with teeth for fingers on either side of your mouth hole these fangs are Hollow and connected to a Venom gland that delivers well Venom this Venom both paralyzes prey and begins to digest them from the inside all right so if you've ever wondered how few the folks are that a cricket gears then look at this this tarantula right here is eating two crickets but you know what the cricket in the front is doing it's freaking eating the other Cricket I mean that right there now the fangs don't just puncture you can see them right here sort of squeezing the side of the calicity opposite the fangs is lined with little teeth-like structures that help crush the prey like a little Nutcracker oh that's nasty this is important because spiders forgot to evolve a mouth that can chew they just have a narrow tube connected to a sucking stomach which acts a bit like the bulb end of a pipette tarantulas are essentially on a liquid diet and have to puree their food and even strain it through special straining hairs to get rid of the chunks they often wrap their prey up in silk which can be a bit of an awkward pirouette if the food's up front and the silk comes out the back it's not easy and some of the things they eat are big like this one got a baby pass awesome you try making silk pajamas for a possum with your ex oh look it's time for mating this is Clarence and he's going to show you how he makes his sperm whib now when human males masturbate it often ends with the kleenex male tarantulas on the other hand start the whole process by making one while he's setting it up let me explain spiders evolved from arthropods that lived in the water if you live in the water you don't have to worry about your sperm drying out you can just let your sperms and eggs float around and make babies but when they came on land they had to figure out how to get the sperms over to the females they didn't want a penis come on a spider with a penis it would screw up their defensive posture I'll tell you that it wouldn't be frightening it'd be lurid so Evolution said I have an idea so male spiders evolved a special organ on their second pair of Limbs these palpal bulbs are often hidden because they're tucked back and under you can see one right there peeking out a bit if you flip them forward you can get a better view I mean in the end it does look a bit like a dog penis inside it's quite complex and it takes a number of molds before all the parts are formed and in the right places it's essentially a long coiled up tube inside of a very specific shape that's different for each species it has to be bendy and stiff in just the right places to work now here's the problem the place where the sperm comes out is not near these bulbs and in fact it's Out Of Reach seems like a pretty big oversight but this is where clarence's little nappy comes in it's pretty ingenious first he separates a bit from the ground and then climbs underneath so he's upside down then he turns around it's a bit awkward he has another pair of little spinnerets behind the big ones and he uses them to weave a tiny little patch of special silk it's onto this patch that he deposits sperm so the sperm sort of hangs down like a little goober then he climbs back on top of the web and then alternately sticks his little hand bulbs into the sperm ball capillary action pulls sperm up into the tubes you can try this at home once his palpable bulbs are loaded with the sperms the male is ready for a night out on the town or day whatever it takes really he's a very horny spider at this point he leaves the safety of his burrow in search of a female butt sorry in search of a female but females like to stay in on the weekends have some me time so the male has to do a sort of trick-or-treat version of dating where you wander around and knock on doors hoping to get lucky oops that's another male the problem with all of this is that it leaves the male tarantula very vulnerable is snack size for quite a few animals and has a nice little crunch to him luckily he isn't completely defenseless he's got the fangs and a defensive posture designed to show them off but remember they have hairs for everything so of course there's some special defensive hairs some species have these patches of strangulating City by rubbing them together they can make a hissing noise that's a noisy not so patient spider right there no judgment I mean have you ever been accosted by a microphone the size of your upper body you might make that sound too some of the new world tarantulas also have urticating machete these seti are Barbed and designed to break off fairly easily often the way they break leaves one end with a tip that looks just like a hypodermic needle they are designed to work themselves down and into a surface on contact and let me tell you if these urticating hairs get on your skin or in your eyes or on your mucous membranes they can hurt like hell kill me some tarantulas will rapidly rub these seti patches when they are threatened sending out a little cloud of these hairs but despite all of this they still have a serious issue with one predator in particular it is called the tarantula hawk a name which is a lot less frightening than what it is which is a wasp but imagine a wasp that compared to you is roughly the size of a dog and you know what this wasp does it goes searching around in tarantula Burrows or just Waits until the horny males come out and and then tries to sting them through the soft patch on their belly look at this one he flipped right on his back like some Jujitsu specialist what the you gonna do against that walk away certainly but don't raise your butt up like that it gives them a Target oh there it goes if the WASP finds an opening all it takes is a moment the sting delivers a Venom that paralyzes the tarantula the WASP then drags the tarantula about looking for a suitable spot where it will pause and then lay its eggs on top of the tarantula's body then it freaking buries it often alive and then you know what happens the little wasp babies eat the tarantula it's horrifying and that's the kind of that the male tarantulas have to deal with when they want to go out on a date once the male finds a hidey hole with a potential mate he has to convince the female to come out and party now it might not look like much but this is sort of like an upside down version of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet but they both have Bongos and Juliet is potentially a pissed off cannibal half of one sixth dozen of the other here you can see it a bit better in the cutaway diorama versions see all that tapping where they're flirting by morse code using vibrations now it goes on like this until she stops responding or she comes out of the burrow which can be terrifying you know she shows up at the door and she's heavily armed the tarantula is a chance to feel each other out literally it's kind of cute looks like the fidgety hand holding of a movie first date now all this closeness does start to force the issue of the whole fangs thing male tarantulas have Spurs on their front pair of legs one of the first moves he has to pull off is to get those Spurs underneath the females fangs if this part up it's best to just abort once he has his spurs in place and her fangs are firmly secured he lifts her up and begins to explore her Underside with his spammed up palps the female has two small openings that lead to her spermeth aching organs that store sperm until the female is ready to lay her eggs here's what the spermithaki looked like from the inside think of them like little pockets for sperm you don't want to put your keys in there spermothaki come in all sorts of shapes this one looks like a drowning snail here's a Happy Frog two pigs in a hot tub that just had an argument or a gummy bear that just wants to hide under the covers the male's palpable balm is just the right shape to put sperm into these little pockets now people used to think that the males found these holes without being able to feel anything because they assumed the bulbs evolve from claws which don't have nerves but recently science hippies figured out they come from something behind the claw so they can feel and the spiders are like yeah duh that's why we keep doing it anyways once he finds those holes he saw sort of injects his sperm into the spermathanki on top of whatever other sperm might be up there whoever is last has the best shot at fertilizing the eggs when it's all over it's time for the male to make a quick Escape lest he become the snack for the post-sex hungries females can store sperm until they're ready to lay eggs the sperm isn't active during that time instead clusters of sperm are held inside of these little balls go figure called conospermia this seems to be protection against drying out but when the female is ready to lay her eggs the outer membranes of these balls break and release the individual sperm they then uncoil and are ready for the fertilization party the female constructs a little silk nappy on the ground called an egg Sac it will provide a sterile insulated environment for her babies some species embed their uricating hairs into the egg Sac which provides a bit of extra protection against parasites once this layer is done she deposits her eggs quickly and carefully the eggs are surrounded by a fluid that will be absorbed in the first hour of development depending on the species she will lay anywhere from a handful of eggs to thousands she then begins to lay down another layer of silk gently and precisely making a soft and sterile silk home for all her future little babies I mean it's a little weird you know I mean she basically sewed her children into a bean bag and then she drags that around you know excuse me Madam what you got there oh it's a dirty pillow stuffed with your babies I mean that's a phone call to protective services and I'll tell you some of them get frogs to babysit and you know you can't trust a frog I mean I suppose it's better than a cricket because they don't give up [Music] the teeth 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Channel: Ze Frank

Views: 3,534,163

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Id: EhJYtmZuhV4

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022