Spiders - A true story

Scary spider story.  What would 007 do?

I am not a squeamish person. If I hadn't realized this at a young age it certainly came home to me in my first year of university Zoology labs. Eventually my majors were Zoology and Entomology - neither course suited to the faint-hearted. Along with many fellow students I saw the 1962 James Bond movie, Dr. No, in which the villainous Dr. Julius No attempted to eliminate Sean Connery by having the bad guys put large, hairy, poisonous, black Tarantulas in his bed. Being a student of the biological sciences I was one of the few in the viewing audience who knew that, in real life, Tarantulas are not deadly to humans, but the squeals and gasps of horror from most around me did cause me some discomfort and I later had a few restless nights thinking about it.

Fast forward about 15 years. I was serving in an Army Reserve Unit in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and was bivouacked with seven members of my patrol in a partially constructed encampment in the Zambezi Valley. The Zambezi Valley was not our favorite destination for a 4 week military call-up in October. It is a remote, low lying, wild area, where daytime summer temperatures reach over 100 degrees often. As the summer rains begin to arrive, the afternoon sky fills with huge cumulus clouds and the humidity soars. October is appropriately called "suicide month" in that part of southern Africa.  

Before continuing with my spidery tale of horror I should describe the sun spider. In scientific circles the sun spider (or camel spider, wind scorpion, or roman spider) is known as a Solifuge (from the Latin meaning "fleeing from the sun"). Descriptions include phrases such as:
"A diverse and fascinating, yet poorly known, order of specialized, mostly nocturnal, cursorial (means "adapted to or involving running") hunting arachnids notable for their massively powerful two-segmented chelicerae (read "jaws"), voracious appetite, and tremendous speed."
"Solifuges vary from a few millimeters to 10 centimeters (4 inches) in length and look superficially like stout, hairy, fast-running spiders with an extra pair of legs (leg-like, sensory pedipalps, held out in front of the body)."

"Their head has a very characteristic shape with powerful jaws or chelicerae with which they seize and chew their prey."
"The whole animal is covered by long sensory hairs or setae which glisten in the sun.
"In some species retreats are located under rocks, logs and other debris which are merely scrapes in the ground made by loosening the soil with their chelicerae and moving it away with their feet."
"They have an insatiable appetite and sometimes gorge themselves until almost ready to pop. After subduing a prey item, some solifugids bite off the preys' legs, then proceed to eat it head first. They have an incredibly high metabolism and never seem to stand still for a moment. They are attracted by lights and are commonly found near campfires where they are more frequently encountered."

As a further warning I will tell you in advance that the sun spider that I encountered was at least 4 inches long and very soft and hairy. If you feel uncomfortable reading about fat, hairy, spiders please stop here.

Back to the story. My patrol had set up our folding stretchers in two adjoining rooms in a crude structure made from concrete cinder blocks. There were two window openings, with no frames, and one door opening, without a frame or actual door. The floor was smooth concrete. The roof was corrugated iron sheeting screwed onto wood trusses. The astute reader can imagine how this metal roof accentuated the 100 degree summer heat during the day. The unskilled builders who had secured the corrugated iron sheets onto the wood beams had located the screws in the lower part of each corrugation. The consequence of this would not become evident to any of us until it rained, when the water would pour through the screw holes into the rooms below.
In any event, day after day, the humidity continued to build and we hoped for a cooling thundershower. Eventually it came, preceded by incredible lightning flashes and deafening thunder. We had all gone to bed. As the rain began to fall, the water began to pour onto us from the misplaced, but evenly spaced, holes screwed into the metal roofing. Every 2ft 6in was a thin but copious stream of water. The four of us in my room raced to move our beds and our backpacks into the narrow spaces between the water spouts, and then jumped back onto our beds to wait out the storm.

The only place I could position my stretcher was with one end, the head end, against the rough cinder block wall. I lay down again and, because the air was cooler now, pulled the sleeping bag loosely over me. I was barefoot, of course, and wore (for the really curious reader) a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. I was now able to settle down, with my small pillow and head against the wall and with the rest of me and my gear out of the rain. Apart from the frequent flashes of lightning the room was in total darkness.

Within a minute or two I heard scurrying sounds across the floor and on the wall near my head. I started to reach under my bed for a flashlight but was interrupted by a loud "plop" on my pillow. Suddenly my senses, especially my hearing, became acute and every movement of the sun spider near my right ear was magnified. My first reaction was to reach down with both hands and draw the two flaps of my sleeping bag up to my chin and hold it there as tightly as I could. I had a flash-back of James Bond and his Tarantulas and instinctively tried to prevent this large crawling creature that had joined me on my pillow from getting into my lower regions. What would 007 do?

As I lay completely motionless, the soft, furry, hairy creature moved onto my hair and up onto my forehead, coming to a stop with its body on my nose. Its rear legs were touching my closed eyelids and its forelegs were touching my upper lip.

Can you imagine how hard it was to remain motionless with a furry appendage touching my upper lip, or to resist twitching my nose? This 4 inch long, sun spider sat there for the longest time - probably just a few seconds. It then crawled across my chin and down onto my neck and, denied access to my sleeping bag, eventually plopped onto the floor to join its dozen friends and associates scurrying around looking for something to eat.

I threw my sleeping bag open, jumped out of bed and grabbed my flashlight with one hand and a boot with the other. The other men did the same and within minutes, the walls and floor of our little shelter were spattered with the goopy remains of almost a dozen sun spiders. Some escaped through the window and door openings through which they had entered. By now the rain had tailed off. I moved my bed away from the wall, made sure there were no spiders in my bedding, boots or backpack and lay down to sleep again. Another day in paradise had passed.

Over the years I have told this true story many times, enjoying the reaction it gets from arachnophobes. It is interesting to see that some of our troops serving in the Middle East have posted similar stories on the internet describing their encounters with a very similar "camel spider," also a member of the Solifuge family. So, when you go to bed tonight, sleep tight and don't let the spiders bite.