Spiders in Art, Technology, and Morphology

drawing by Kathy Hodge

Humans tend to have an instinctive fear of spiders, which is probably a good thing, since some species are deadly. Our local R.I. spiders, though, are harmless to humans. ... well, at least, mostly.

Click on "Read more" to learn about spider technology, spiders on drugs, and spiders beneath the sea.

Photo by Dann Thombs

Tiverton photographer Dann Thombs has been documenting our local insect life for several years, using a macro-lens. Click here for his amazing collection of 30 spiders found locally. While you're there, check out the rest of his Web site, which aims to create a pictorial catalog of all our R.I. bugs.

Kathy Hodge, an East Providence artist, has recently taken an interest in spiders, this drawing is one of her new studies.


The silk that spiders spin for their webs may seem fragile and delicate, but for its size, it is stronger than steel. When astronomers at the Ladd Observatory, on Hope Street in Providence, recently restored some antique equipment, they needed a strand of spider silk for a telescope sight. Astronomer Mike Umbricht recruited a wild spider and kept it until he had the silk he needed, then he let it go. Here is a picture of the transit telescope, from 1895:

Some NASA scientists back in 1995 tried exposing spiders to various types of chemicals and documented the results in their web designs.

 This is a normal web, above. The two below are the result of spiders given marijuana and benzedrine.

This video shows what happens in this experiment... sort of. Be sure to watch it all the way through, it's only two minutes long, and it's full of surprises. I found it on youtube, and I'm not sure who created it, but it's been watched 25 million times. The NASA research it's based on was real.

Are Rhode Island spiders dangerous? According to URI:

The only dangerous spiders in the northeast are the very rare black widow and brown recluse spiders. These spiders are not native to the northeast, but may be occasionally transported here (the brown recluse is from the southwestern United States and the black widow is from the southern United States). Other spiders may be annoying due to their webs, but, unpopular as they are, most spiders are shy and harmless to humans.

But a One New Thing reader disputes that:

I saw multitudes of black widows as a kid (around Mashpaug Pond, Providence, before all the neighborhoods were demolished for industrial use and parts of the pond were filled in; also in Greenville, RI, &c., &c.) and i saw a monster brown recluse scuttling across the living room carpet (faster than I could wac-a-mole it) in the old house down the hill here [in Wellfleet] a few summers ago ....

So, are spiders harmless? Generally, yes, but it never hurts to be on your guard for something that looks strange and threatening.

Spider crabs are common in Narragansett Bay. They are not related to spiders, but it's easy to see where the name comes from. They are more tolerant of poor water quality than some of our other Bay crabs, so they tend to be more abundant in the shallow and northern parts of the Bay. Farther south and in deeper areas of the Bay, there is more diversity, and the spider crabs have to face more competition.

Learn more about spiders:
URI fact sheet

Learn more about spider crabs:
URI fact sheet