They can run, and they can try to hide, but no spider can escape the tireless pursuit of Martin Nicholas, as he proves in True Adventures of the Ultimate Spider-Hunter.

Comic book hero Spider-Man can climb walls and swing from building to building on super-strong silk. But that’s nothing compared to the spider superpowers revealed in True Adventures of the Ultimate Spider-Hunter.

Join spider expert Martin Nicholas, a mild-mannered water treatment engineer by day, as he tours the world in search of some of the most amazing arachnids. First stop is Arizona, where the spider hunter encounters Tucson blond tarantulas. This spider can detect movement on the surface from two feet down its burrow. The desert also harbors jumping spiders, with binocular-like eyes and incredible jumping abilities. In southern Mexico, Nicholas seeks the legendary golden orb-weaver, which produces the world’s strongest silk. Armed with his spider-cam — “a miracle of precision engineering and duct tape” — Nicholas travels to French Guiana in search of the world’s biggest spider, the goliath bird-eater, which can grow to 12 inches in diameter.

Along the way, meet communal spiders that work together — by the thousands — to build web cities, and the pink-toed tarantula, which can both skydive and walk on water! Even Spider-Man might have a hard time equaling that.

To order a copy of True Adventures of the Ultimate Spider-Hunter, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for True Adventures of the Ultimate Spider-Hunter was originally posted February 2006.

If spider silk came out of a factory, it would be hailed as one of the greatest inventions of all time. Delicate yet amazingly sturdy, strong yet stunningly beautiful, it is a material that brings life and death. A spider’s silk is a web of contradictions and a scientific mystery still waiting to be solved.

As NATURE’s True Adventures of the Ultimate Spider-Hunter shows, spiders use their silk in dazzling ways — from building webs that telegraph the presence of trapped prey to creating barriers against unwanted visitors. Overall, the world’s spiders produce at least seven different kinds of silk, with most species producing five to six types. Silk threads are manufactured in special glands and then extruded from “spinnerets,” which control the thickness. Some spiders have several pairs of spinnerets, each producing a different kind of silk.

In Spider-Hunter, viewers see how spiders put different silks to use. In one scene, a female Tucson blond tarantula weaves a silky cover over her burrow in an attempt to rebuff an amorous male tarantula. Unfortunately, he doesn’t take the hint, and ends up getting eaten. “I’m afraid this male got his female, but not in the way that he was hoping,” says the show’s resident spider expert, Martin Nicholas.

Martin Nicholas examines a golden orb-weaving spider’s web.

Other spiders use a special silk to wrap up precious cargo — their eggs. Egg-case silk protects against predators and parasites. Another kind, called dragline silk, is used to build webs and essentially acts like telegraph wires. The vibrating silk tells the spider exactly where a potential meal has hit the web. This silk is five to six times stronger than steel and can be stretched up to 40 percent of its length without breaking.

In southern Mexico, Nicholas introduces viewers to the golden orb-weaving spider, believed to spin the world’s strongest silk. It can stop a buzzing bee in mid-flight and trap small birds. To demonstrate its toughness, Nicholas throws a ping pong ball into a golden orb’s web. The silk stretches, but doesn’t break. Indeed, Nicholas says that if human spinners were able to weave a thick rope from the golden orb’s silk, it would be strong enough to lift a jumbo jet.

In hopes of learning how to synthesize the strong, supple material, researchers have been trying to unlock the biological secrets of silk. Several teams have sequenced genes that enable spiders to manufacture the substance. One day, those genes might be engineered into cells that are cultured in giant vats and used to make spider silk on an industrial scale.

Some scientists have already learned to synthesize small quantities of silk in the laboratory. Biologist Uri Gat of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, for instance, put one spider silk gene into caterpillar cells and produced vials of tough but elastic thread. Other researchers, at Nexia Biotechnologies near Montreal, Canada, put spider genes into the cells that goats use to produce milk. The result was milk laced with molecules of supple silk many times stronger than steel. Potential uses include super tough fabric for bulletproof vests and extremely strong thread for surgeons.

Not all silk researchers are using genetic engineering. Some are chemists trying to mimic the chemical reactions that produce silk molecules. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, teams of chemists are experimenting with the polymers that give silk its flexibility and durability. So far, however, they’ve had trouble accomplishing what a spider does with apparent ease. Indeed, some spiders can produce yards of silk a day, as they constantly reweave and repair their webs.

So, for the time being, spider silk remains a scientific mystery and a marvel of nature.

In a 1960s comic book, a bespectacled, weakling high school student named Peter Parker visits a science exhibit and is bitten by a mysterious spider. Soon, he is transformed into Spider-Man, a wall-crawling superhero.

The spider bite does wonders for Peter Parker’s eyes too: he doesn’t need his glasses anymore. But even Spider-Man’s eyesight isn’t as impressive as a real spider’s, as NATURE’s True Adventures of the Ultimate Spider-Hunter demonstrates.

For starters, spiders usually have eight eyes. And although many spider eyes are crude and can detect little more than light and dark, some arachnids are able to detect kinds of light invisible to humans. A few spiders, for instance, have eyes built to polarize light — think of built-in sunglasses — allowing them to navigate by sensing the direction and angle of the sun’s rays.

Spiders that actively hunt and stalk their prey, such as jumping spiders, have excellent vision.

Jumping spiders, featured in Spider-Hunter, are known for their ability to leap 10 or even 30 times their own length. (That would be like a human jumping half a football field.) But jumping spiders spend a lot of time looking for prey before they leap — and they have remarkable eyes that help out.

Researchers have found that jumping spiders have three distinct types of eyes, each with special powers that would make Spider-Man envious. Eyes on the side of the spider’s head are like wide-angle lenses that give it a broad, although somewhat blurry view of the landscape. Imagine looking through a nice picture window made of old, wavy glass: it’s hard to see detail, but you can still spot something — like a tasty beetle — that’s moving.

To focus in on its prey, the jumping spider uses larger eyes located on the front of its head. They are like a telescope, providing a sharper, magnified image — probably in living color. These eyes can swivel to follow a moving target. Then, as the spider moves in for the kill, it uses its other pair of eyes on either side of the large telescopic pair to measure just how far it needs to jump.

Other spiders have eyes that stand out in a different way — they reflect light like small mirrors. Those spooky eyes glimmering in the basement shadows, tracking your every move? You’ve probably spotted a wolf spider, a champion hunter of the twilight.

“Wolfies,” as they are known to some spider lovers, have eyes equipped with structures called tapetas that help them see in low-light conditions — just like a curved mirror helps collect light for an astronomer’s telescope. Shine a flashlight on a tapeta, and it bounces some of the light back, producing that distinctive glow.

Such natural innovations haven’t escaped the attention of engineers looking to build better mechanical eyes for robotic spacecraft, automated airplanes, and remotely operated submarines. Researchers in California, for example, are experimenting with spider-inspired eyes for a future generation of Mars rovers.

The goal, researchers at the California Institute of Technology say, is to build sensors that produce sharp images with less power. One creative option is to try to mimic a jumping spider’s eye, which uses an unusual vibrating retina to collect information. Vibration allows the retina to collect more information with fewer moving parts, saving energy.

The mechanical eye is much bigger than a real spider’s eye — about the size of a matchbox. But the device could be “a very elegant way to win big on power and allow you to do smart imaging,” NASA engineer Christopher Assad told the magazine New Scientist. He and other engineers caution, however, that it could be years before the device is perfected. In the meantime, both biologists and engineers continue to take a close look at spider eyes, hoping to mimic in just a few years remarkable sensors that evolved over millennia.

Online Chat with Martin Nicholas and Fred Kaufman
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/02/09/DI2006020901320.html
Arachnologist Martin Nicholas and Executive Producer of NATURE Fred Kaufman were online Monday, February 13, 2006 to field your questions and comments about the world’s spiders and to discuss the NATURE program “True Adventures of the Ultimate Spider-Hunter.”

BBC Radio: Adventures of the Spider Man
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/spiderman.shtml
Listen to Martin Nicholas as he discusses his passion for spiders, preparations for his trip to Peru to find the chicken-eating spider, and finally, his successful sighting of the infamous tarantula.

How Spiders See the World
http://www.amonline.net.au/spiders/toolkit/hairy/see.htm
Find out more about how spiders use all eight of their eyes.

Spider Web and Silk
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ednieuw/Spiders/InfoNed/webthread.html
Read a complete briefing on spiderweb and silk from spider enthusiast Ed Nieuwenhuys.

Tucson Blond Tarantula
http://www.centralpets.com/animals/insects/tarantulas/tar4088.html
Learn more about this large burrowing spider, also known as the Mexican blond tarantula.

Communal Spiders
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/5_8_99/bob2.htm
Discover the remarkable lives of these social spiders.

British Tarantula Society
http://www.thebts.co.uk/
Check out articles, discussion boards, video clips, and photo galleries about tarantulas.

PBS Kids: Backyard Jungle
http://pbskids.org/backyardjungle
Kids can load photos, drawings, and descriptions about their natural surroundings where they live, their “backyard.”

NATURE: Deep Jungle
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/deepjungle
Learn about Martin Nicholas’s search for the chicken-eating spider.

Books

Barth, Friedrich. A SPIDER’S WORLD: SENSES AND BEHAVIOR. Frankfurt: Springer, 2001.

Foelix, Rainer. BIOLOGY OF SPIDERS. Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Levi, Herbert. SPIDERS AND THEIR KIN. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

Preston-Mafham, Rod. SPIDERS OF THE WORLD. New York: Facts on File, 1984.

Schultz, Stanley. THE TARANTULA KEEPER’S GUIDE. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, 1998.

In NATURE’s Deep Jungle: Monsters of the Forest, spider expert Martin Nicholas travels to South America’s Amazon in search of a spider known as the chicken-eating spider. He heard from a friend about a giant spider that can kill a hen, and he wants to see if these tall tales are true. With the help of a tiny “spider cam” that can see down spider holes, Nicholas comes face-to-face with a huge spider (possibly new to science) that is nearly a foot across and could easily eat a chicken. NATURE spoke with Nicholas at his home in Great Britain.

How did you get involved in spider hunting?

Martin Nicholas: I’ve always been interested in spiders. When I grew up outside of London, the other kids were pulling the legs off insects, but I was the one feeding flies to spiders and studying their behavior. It just grew on me.

But you are not a full-time spider researcher.

No, I sell commercial water treatment plants for a living. Once or twice a year I get out for an expedition, to see something new. I’ve been to Vietnam, South America, all over. Every time I go out, I learn something new. I’ve even discovered a couple of new species … one is a small, brown, stripey tarantula that builds the most incredible tube webs. It is going to be named after me.

How did you get interested in the chicken-eating spider?

It started a few years back with a letter from a friend in Peru who built power plants. He heard this story of a chicken-eating spider. I love those kinds of stories, they are irresistible. So I had to go to Peru and see if it was true.

The spider cam allowed you to see some remarkable behavior, including some young tarantulas in the same burrow with what appeared to be a parent. …

Yes, there were some real surprises. Seeing the big mama tarantula with the young was remarkable. Most tarantulas are in no way gregarious. In fact, they often cannibalize their own young. So seeing that was very unusual. But it may make sense. It looks like when they go out at night as a group, they can catch and kill larger prey by working together. We also discovered that those spiders appeared to be keeping a pet. There was a little frog that lived down in the hole with the spiders. It may offer some sort of service to spiders, like sweeping up ants that might bother the spiders.

You believe that mother spider was about 10 inches across. How big are the biggest tarantulas?

I believe the record is 11.8 inches, held by the Goliath spider of Venezuela.

Is the chicken-eating spider a new species?

We don’t know yet. I would like to get it properly identified. There are two or three other large black tarantulas that live in the area.

Where would you like to go spider hunting next?

Central Africa. That’s my next big spider project. The logistics are very difficult, but there are potentially several kinds of giant spiders living in the region. One that was 11.5 inches across once walked into a British fort a long time ago, but it has never been seen again. Perhaps it was a freak of nature, but maybe not.

Do you keep spiders as pets?

Oh yes. I live in a big converted chapel, and they’ve got one whole end of a hall. I keep, breed, and photograph dozens of species. I always say keeping and feeding 500 tarantulas is cheaper than keeping a single dog!

In the Amazon — the world’s largest rainforest — trees fight to the death for water and sunlight. Giant spiders as big as dinner plates take shelter in underground lairs. Buzzing bees and scurrying mammals help hold together an amazing web of life that centers on the Brazil nut tree. One of the world’s largest rivers carries floodwaters that turn forests into massive lakes.

NATURE’s Deep Jungle: Monsters of the Forest takes you into the depths of the Amazon, home to millions of marvelous species. Here you will be treated to a front-row seat while….

Bee expert David Roubik takes on a hive of bees in the Peruvian jungle in an effort to understand the bizarre relationship among the bees, a fragrant orchid flower, and the towering Brazil nut tree.

Tarantula expert Martin Nicholas searches for a spider so big and fierce it can reputedly attack a chicken.

A sneaky strangler fig tree takes on a 160-foot-tall Brazil nut tree — and wins.

It’s all part of the amazing web of life that is the Amazon.

To order a copy of Deep Jungle, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Deep Jungle was originally posted in April 2005.