The New Yorker, 2006-05-08

[fiefoe]

Al Gore: "at the end of this I want to have some bread crumbs left leading back to my dignity."

Eugene de Salignac photos

“Spider Woman” / Burkhard Bilger

• ...a dinner hosted by the local Explorers Club. The menu included tempura-battered tarantulas, he said, but the cooks had neglected to clean them properly. The spiders' barbed hairs got stuck in some diner's throats, and they had to be taken to the emergency room.
• The spiders (in the Amazon basin of Peru) were of a rare, social kind. They gathered in the rain forest by the hundreds of thousands and constructed communal webs, some of which were the length of a tractor-trailer.
• Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time.
• The water spider builds a web beneath the waves, anchored to a plant, and fills it with bubbles that it collects on the surface. The bubbles coalesce into an airy chamber where the spider can sit safe from predators.

"Hoofing It" / Simon Schama

'Whistlejacket';  squab <young pigeon>.

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