They Flee From the Sun

 I was one of those kids who carried every creeping thing home and made a cage for it. I don't mean bunnies and baby birds, I mean black widows and six-foot long snakes. Kids like that, I have observed, always seemed to have a wonderfully understanding and tolerant mother, although in my case there was also an older sister terrified of everything with scales or eight legs. I don't know how many times I stepped out the door on my way to school and whispered to my mother: My pet snakes (that the sister had never been told about) have escaped and are crawling around somewhere in the upstairs bedrooms. Bye.

Well, my other observation is that those little kids never grow out of it. Take my own case. I am eighty-five years old and still love the creepie-crawlies, in fact the more sinister the better. Luckily I have a wife as understanding as my mother was. More than that: She loves the little creatures too. But in the past year we have left the relatively tame MidWest (where I kept Black Widows and Brown Recluses),and moved to Tucson and the opportunity to come into contact with exponentially creepier creatures, seriously venomous Bark Scorpions, for instance, going beyond even what my wife will accept as a house pet. Her justification is that our four-year-old grandson gets into everything when he comes to  our house and I guess he does.

Luckily, there are still a number of other wonderful creepy creatures remaining for me to keep, creatures with names like Tailless Whipscorpion, for instance, or Vinegaroon, and the strangest of all, and the one I want to write about here, the solifuge. Our cat found the first one of these we had ever seen, chasing it out of a dusty back corner of our house. I quickly popped it it into an open wide-mouth jar so we could look down on it and make our first examination.

What we saw (going from back to front) was a segmented abdomen in shape like a limp half-full vacuum cleaner bag with the skin and  texture of a cadaver. Then there were eight legs (showing its kinship with spiders) and in front of those was one more pair of legs, twice as long as the regular legs, and three times as thick, and everything still with the same bloated corpse coloring.

Next forward was what we assumed must be the head, though it was only a little bit closer to the front, and looked otherwise like another segment. But on its leading edge the two tiny black dots so close to each other they were virtually touching were evidently the eyes, and since they were in the middle of the back they could only be pointing directly upward rather than forward at something.

At any rate, it was certainly bizarre enough to satisfy my morbid tastes.

I set it up in a small aquarium, with about an inch of sand on the bottom. It was a nocturnal creature (the name solifugid suggests something that flees from the sun) that plowed around in the sand all night, and by morning had pushed most of the sand to one side, so it could crouch down all day in the hole left on the other side.

We knew it was carnivorous, and we determined it was just the size to eat meal worms. Here is where we discovered its true weirdness: We realized we couldn't figure out what it did. A scorpion has pincers in front with which it can catch its prey and a long tail with a venomous tip to bring over its back to kill its prey. All very sensible. You can see just by looking at it what it does to catch and eat its food. 

Spiders have venomous fangs in front with which the can kill their prey and at the same time inject digestive enzymes (since they don't have jaws to chew them up) to turn the innards of their prey into liquid easy to suck into their stomachs.

But the solifugid doesn't reveal anything you can work out, it's just a pallid body, a bunch of legs, no mouth, no weaponry, and two brainless eyes not pointing anywhere.

We dropped in a meal worm which it ignored, but next morning there was the worm dead, the body a little bit mashed up, and apparently not eaten. 

Then I got Jillian Cowles' big handsome book Amazing Arachnids (Princeton, 2018) and all was made clear. It seems that everything is hidden underneath its body. The bifurcated front half of the head, which is to say, everything coming in front of the tiny eyes, consisted of the enormous muscles which worked a combination of scissors and saw blades with the most powerful crushing jaws of any creature its size.

We put in another worm and saw what it did. We watched from directly in front and saw that it used the pair of enormous legs in front to gather together the prey and position it cross its jaws to begin eating it like an ear of corn, starting at one end and chewing it all the way to the other, the powerful jaws crunching through the thick skin until it was all crushed with all the juices oozing to the surface and it is these juices it sucks into its tiny toothless mouth, leaving the crumpled but intact body behind.

Among their various names, solifugids are called "wind spiders," a reference to the tremendous speed at which they dart around in search of their prey. Our species here is about an inch-and-a-half long. During the Gulf War when our soldiers first began setting up their camp in the Arabian desert one of the disconcerting things they met up with were "Camel Spiders," solifugids closer to six inches long! If someone offered me one I think even I might mumble something about being concerned about my grandson's safety.