Spider plague closes Australian hospital

A tiny Australian hospital is closing temporarily because of an infestation of poisonous spiders.

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Study finds mercury in birds near polluted rivers

Mercury contamination in rivers can spread to nearby birds, even ones that don't eat fish or other food from the water.

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Woman Says Spiders Acted As Lifesavers

A woman who hates spiders is crediting them with helping save her from a house fire.

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A BRIT faces a fine of more than £1million after trying to smuggle 1,000 SPIDERS on a plane. Lee Ardern, 26, was trying to take his haul - including the lethal Brazilian Wandering Spider - into the cabin.

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Pieces of amber containing parts of a spider's web have been found in East Sussex and dated back to the Cretaceous period 140 million years ago, which makes it the oldest spider's web known.

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The world's oldest known spider web has been discovered on a beach in Sussex, England, trapped inside an ancient chunk of amber.

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Researchers have discovered the largest orb-weaving spider ever seen, a (relatively) massive creature whose body is about 1 1/2 inches across and whose leg span reaches 5 inches.

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FEMALE redback spiders eat male mates who do not spend enough time on foreplay. To keep cranky females happy, their partners have to spend about 100 minutes on courtship, doing things such as vibrating their webs and rubbing their tummies.

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A spider that dines almost exclusively on plants has been described by scientists.

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The 40,000 or so spiders that have been described are generally known as strict predators, trapping their prey in elaborate webs or hunting them down directly.

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On a few wondrous days in late summer, the fields around my Vermont house are blanketed by thousands and thousands of spider webs, each sticky strand made visible by its coat of dew.

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For anyone considering going into the business of manufacturing traditional textiles using the filaments extracted from the spinnerets of the golden orb spider of Madagascar, here are a few guidelines to keep in mind

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A newly-discovered spider has been dubbed Heteropoda davidbowie, in the hope that slapping the rock star's moniker on the beast will help raise awareness about the plight of endangered arachnid species worldwide.

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A German spider specialist told the Observer newspaper he named the new species after Bowie — whose album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a huge hit in 1972 — because he wanted to raise awareness about the discovery.

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Sleeping Bear Dunes; summer vacation, part 2

Many years before Michigan was settled by immigrants it was home to several tribes of Native Americans. Their legends have lived on and become interwoven into the history and landscape of the state.

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The Black Widow, a very poisonous kind of spider, is becoming more common in Belgium.

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Relatives of a 6-year-old girl in southwestern Virginia are accused of punishing her for taking food from the kitchen by repeatedly tying her up in a bedroom, surrounded by rubber snakes and spiders to scare her, police said Tuesday.

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7 giant versions of critters, some of which scientists say shouldn't exist.

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Good points made here...using nature to maintain human comfort is a very good and healthy way of life. Spiders are likely the best catchers of insects including mosquitoes and gnats. When my wife and I set up our yard in South Florida, we used many lush tropical plants and trees.

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Scientists have discovered that a species of orb spider builds life-size replica of its own body in an attempt to distract potential predators.

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There is a species of spider that builds models of itself, which it uses as decoys to distract predators.

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Animals take to drugs just as readily as we do. Sometimes they avail themselves of natural highs, and sometimes lab animals get very fond of substances they are fed for research. So, sit back with your stimulant of choice and enjoy New Scientist's round-up of animals on drugs.

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Scientists have found that if the webs of spiders were any more sticky, they would break as they trapped insects, letting the prey escape. So a spider has to balance the stickiness of its web with how strong it is.

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It appears that as the Earth has been warming and summers have been getting longer, the 8-legged hunters have been steadily growing larger and more numerous. And it's likely that other creepy-crawly species around the world could be growing larger too.

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As if global warming isn't giving us enough to worry about, now scientists say it could lead to bigger—and possibly more—spiders of at least one species.

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Climate change could be leading to bigger and more numerous spiders, according to a new study published by a group of German and Danish scientists in British journal Biology Letters on Wednesday.

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Like zombies, spiders in a lab twitched back to life hours after "drowning"—and the scientists were as surprised as anyone.

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London: Spiders in Israel have been seen indulging in a violent but evolutionarily effective mating strategy, which guarantees direct fertilisation of eggs in the ovaries.

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