Purseweb Spider (Atypus affinis) (Photo By Siga – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33463932

Dear Readers, I am a regular reader of the British Arachnological Society newsletter – as you can imagine this is generally a detailed and complicated read, but every so often there’s a story that I can identify with, and which reassures me that there are people out there who are every bit as concerned about their local wildlife as I am.And so it was with delight that I read the report from Hilary Grant, who lives in Jersey and who seems to spend a lot of time rescuing animals that have fallen into her swimming pool. She reports that in 2017, while looking out for newts who needed to be moved on from the pool to a more suitable habitat, she found her first purseweb spider males who had gone for an involuntary swim.

Purseweb spiders are found in many parts of Europe and southern England, and are the only European members of the trapdoor spider family. These are long-lived spiders, and have a most interesting life history. They create a tube web that is partially hidden underground, with the above-ground portion covered in leaves and debris. When an unsuspecting insect stands on the silk and becomes trapped, the spider leaps out, bites through the silk and drags the insect underground to eat it in peace. The spiders do not normally leave their tubes for any reason, except that in the autumn the males leave the safe haven of their tubes and try to find a female – sexual maturity usually takes at least four years. When the male finds a female, he will enter her burrow and the two live together until the male dies soon after mating. Then the spiderlings hatch, and they stay in the burrow with their mother for at least another year.

And so, the spiders that Grant was seeing were clearly on the march, and eventually she identified that they were coming to or from a colony in a flowerbed about 25 metres from the swimming pool. Feeling sorry for all the spiders who appeared to be drowned, she started fishing them out and putting them in  a flowerpot filled with kitchen paper. To her surprise, many of them revived – on one occasion she rescued five, and all five of them were ‘resurrected’, although a haul of eleven spiders resulted in only two surviving. One spider took a full 24 hours to revive, but still made a full recovery. It’s interesting to know that these spiders can survive total immersion in presumably chlorinated water for a period of time.

Grant suggests that, because the spiders live underground, they may have developed mechanisms that enable them to survive the occasional inundation that they must surely suffer – she points out that most spiders drown very quickly, with a heavy downpour being enough to kill even a largish spider. It got me to thinking about occasions when I’ve rescued caterpillars – I’ve found that the absorbent quality of kitchen paper helps to ‘pull’ the water out of the breathing tubes, or spiracles, which is how insects breathe. Spiders have an apparatus called a book lung, which opens on the underside of the abdomen, so I wonder if the paper has a similar ‘blotting’ effect on these structures.

The reaction of the spiders, on reviving, was either to hide in the folds of the kitchen paper or to attempt to ‘dig’ their way out – those enormous ‘jaws’ (known as chelicerae) have been likened to pick-axes. Indeed, Grant mentions that the only time she was ‘attacked’ by a purseweb spider was when she was carrying one to safety, and he ‘bit’ her  (though he was unable to pierce the skin) – she now realises that he was just testing the ‘ground’ of her hand in order to dig his way out of trouble.

I love this story for many reasons – firstly, because Grant is clearly a compassionate person who doesn’t want the spiders in her garden to suffer unnecessarily. Secondly, she has a spirit of scientific curiosity that I can empathise with. And finally, she has a sense of humour that I find most appealing – she describes one spider as ‘doing a very lively breaststroke’, and another as ‘ a grumpy individual’. I find her most inspiring, and hope that she continues to report on her spiders so that we can all see what they’re up to next.