Friday, November 19, 2010 - Oasis State Park, Portales NM
< previous day | archives | next day >
Sunflower, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, August 17, 2010
Night camp
Site 21 - Oasis State Park, Portales NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - connection is reasonably fast.
- Go to Oasis State Park website
- Go to Oasis State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Five Trillion Spiders
Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69