An Alaskan Spider

November was the wettest month in Anchorage weather records although it didn't amount to much-just 2.87 inches melted down. Still, with a reasonably cool month the weather should have made life difficult for spiders.

I was surprised to find a few spiders near freezing and actually a few degrees below. True, they were just walking about and not at an especially high speed. Daddy long legs spiders-about four of them, made their way to the top of the tent beneath the outer shell as it was the most warm and dry place they could find-and that was at thirty two degrees f. They would occasionally bump into each other sending them scattering in a neo-irate chase-defense-readjustment sojourn all over the tent searching for normalacy and a return to the best breath exhalation collecting spot near a vent.

That quartet of spiders seem to have disappeared in the below freezing weather of late. When the temperature was about 15 degrees I saw a brownish spider perhaps a half inch across walking in slow motion up the inside of the tent along a seam toward the top. Maybe with my being inside the tent it was a little warmer than 15, but not much. Tough spider.

A naked spider in pursuit of the most warm thermal spot at 15 degrees while I was just trying to keep my body temperature above 96 or so. That spider must have been at a body temperature of near the ambient atmospheric temperature. Comparatively a human being would have perished from hypothermia at what-85 or 90 degrees body temperature?

Spiders are of the phylum Athropoda (the same as Alaska King crabs and other crustaceans) and the class Arachnida (that excludes crabs). The Athropoda is the most numerous membership class of life on Earth.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/arthropoda/arthropoda.html

I have started reading the book 'A World Without Ice', by Henry Pollack Phd, the scientist that shared the Novel Prize with Al Gore. Its not that hard to imagine, even while that two or three gallons of water I exhale each night becomes frost on the inside of the tent. Maybe all that water is the reason why people don't do as well as some spiders in cold weather.

http://www.worldwithoutice.com/

The spider moving in slow motion at 15 degrees above zero could have been a flower spider or an orb weaver. I tend to believe its the latter because of the web one formed in warmer days, although the cold weather spider resembled the flower spider and wasn't spotted on a web.

http://www.turtlepuddle.org/alaskan/spiders.html