This may or may not be good news, depending on your view of spiders
This is the finding of arachnid researcher Matthew Persons at Susquehanna University. (I didn’t know you could pick Arachnid Research as a major!) Anyway, small wolf spiders can die of fright alone, which is the most extreme form of stress that you can get. There is a point to this, Gentle Readers, I promise. You are not too different from a small spider.
Accidental Discovery
Matthew Persons did not set out to kill small spiders with stress just for the heck of it. He was actually trying to find out why wolf spiders of all sizes bother making silk thread trails, since they do not catch prey by making webs and live on the ground.
Persons still does not know why wolf spiders bother to lay silk trails, but he has discovered that these trails are the triggers for the stress that kills small spiders.
Wolf spiders are a classification of spiders made up of many species. One of the favorite dinners of large wolf spiders is small wolf spiders. Small wolf spiders instinctively know this. When small wolf spiders encounter the silk trail of a Big Bad Wolf spider for 21 consecutive days, even when food is abundant and when no large wolf spiders are present, they will die of stress, waiting for the predator to show up.
And The Point Of This?
We tend to think of spiders as completely different from us. Why, we wouldn’t be dumb enough to die of stress from the droppings of something we couldn’t see!
Oh, really?
When nothing bad is happening to you, do you tend to worry about future events or past events? Then you are putting yourself through the same stress the small wolf spiders went through. Except, they couldn’t avoid their stress. But you can. If you catch yourself worrying about something that is not an immediate danger, stop and remind yourself that now is not the time to stress out.
The big lesson from all of this is that even spiders need to learn a relaxation skill such as meditation…and stay away from arachnid researchers.
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