It’s a never-ending well of information, this World Wide Web (web being the operative word for this story). My mother was a librarian and my father a bookworm, and it wasn’t unusual as children for our dinner to compete for table space with reference books as we argued our case or delved deeper into an interesting subject that had come up in dinner-time conversation. How much easier it is now to just whip out our phones and find the answers there. (Interesting how using your PDA at the table is considered the height of rudeness but leaping up and down to the bookshelves wasn’t.) 

The point of this story is that during lunch recently a spider parasailed onto the tabletop, and as it was tiny, the arachnophobes among us weren’t hysterical, but it did lead to a question – based on the guest’s diminutive size – as to how many spiders there might be close by that we simply didn’t see. Cue PDAs. Turns out that it is estimated that there is always a spider/s within three metres of you, with some estimates at less than one metre

That fact led to a raft of others such as some spiders can solve simple 3D puzzles; some spiders study the habits of other spiders so they can ambush them; spiders live for about a year although tarantulas hang in there for up to 25 years; and most interesting of all, despite how light and delicate spiders are, they have nevertheless been responsible for the development of steel that cannot be sunk. It was spiders with superhydrophobic bodies that inspired the research, which you can read about too, on the Web, which is only fitting as the other interesting piece of information I found was that the research between unsinkable spiders and unsinkable steel was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.