Today's Reading
Stories told of camel spiders certainly do their best to inspire terror, starting with their name. The story—its dominant variation, anyway—is that they earned their association with camels by latching onto the dromedaries and eating them from the underside. Some stories grant the spiders the decency of waiting for the camels to die first, others don't.
Like any great attempt at misinformation, these claims can be tested. Even in the absence of a camel spider, the next time you find yourself next to a camel, poke it in the belly to see if it lacks a self-defense mechanism.
The Great Camel Spider Misinformation Campaign begins, in fact, with the creatures' name. Camel spiders are not spiders at all. They belong to an order of animals called Solifugae, Latin for "fleeing the sun." Other common names include wind scorpions and sun spiders, and it should be noted that they are also not scorpions.
They are, however, to paraphrase Eleanor Shellstrop in The Good Place, some ugly motherforkers, at least by humanity's questionable standards.
Perhaps this is why, in the time-honored human tradition of mocking those unlucky enough to have not been born beautiful, so many false stories about them exist.
Beginning with their misleading name, they are said to kill and eat camels, to grow as long as a human forearm, to run at speeds of up to 25 miles an hour and jump up to six feet. Even if you outrun them, they can haunt your sleep, where their venomous bite numbs your flesh, which they strip from your bones. Whatever flesh they don't tear from your body might fall off later, anyway, due to their conveniently multifunctional venom. Oh, and they may also feel inclined to lay some eggs in you for good measure.
We can all feel fortunate that we face no danger of being eaten alive by these little guys, or of becoming unwilling surrogate parents.
In fact, camel spiders aren't venomous and are unlikely to even attempt to bite a human, much as most people wouldn't just stick a pocketknife into something 100 times their size. I mean, sure, there's always one. As my drill sergeant once said before a field exercise: "I don't want to see any of you white boys fucking with the wildlife! Seriously, why do you do that?"
I don't know, Drill Sergeant. I honestly don't know...
Although we need not fear being excarnated by a camel spider, it's easy to see where that particular myth comes from. Their mandibles consist of a double set of pincers called chelicerae, which look like the result of a crab bumping uglies with the Predator.
Extending outward from their chelicerae are two appendages, called pedipalps, that look like a bonus set of extra-long legs. These are covered in coarse, sticky hair that helps the camel spider grab its prey and bring it to the wood chipper of its chelicerae.
Camel spiders also use their chelicerae for both survival and mating. Simultaneously. This one is not a myth.
After traveling long distances—camel spiders are quite solitary—to find a female, a male camel spider will creep up on its unwitting potential mate and delicately "massage" her with his pedipalps in an effort to induce a catatonic state of torpor. So that she doesn't kill him. While this sounds objectively terrible by human standards, it gets much worse.
In order to seal the deal, the male needs to get his ball through the net, so to speak, without losing focus on the ongoing life-or-death massage. And due to some questionably intelligent design on the part of camel spider anatomy, this involves one of several complicated maneuvers.
In one, he uses his chelicerae to position the female, then gets his sperm on them and uses them to transfer said sperm into her genital opening. In another, the male first uses his chelicerae to "chew" or massage the female's abdomen and move away from her as she begins to exit torpor. Before she fully regains her senses (assuming all goes according to plan), he releases a capsule of sperm called a spermatophore, which he grabs with his chelicerae and plunges into the female's genital opening. Then he runs like hell.
There is actually a genus within the Solifugae—the Eremobates—that simply transfers the spermatophore directly from the genital opening of the male to the genital opening of the female. This is much less fun to describe.
For the truly deviant, the female camel spider's response to the male's pedipalps may be a purely mechanical reaction, as the same behavior has been witnessed in response to being handled in field and laboratory settings. You pervs.
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