Scytodes pallida

Scytodes pallida is a spider with long legs and a body carried in a hunch, and it spits toxic webbing at its prey. It hunts jumping spiders, which makes it the first enemy in the story and, much later, one of the neighbours the spiders chose not to destroy.

Description

A Scytodes is longer limbed than a jumping spider, and its eyes are small and weak. Its weapon is its spit: sprays of webbing, sticky and venomous, thrown over a spider at home in its web or over an intruder on the ground. It keeps to a web of its own and comes down off the silk to hunt in packs.

In chapter 2.2 a troop of them is somewhere between Portia and the large ground hunter in size. Portia’s people call them the Spitters. The later, uplifted ones are the neo-Scytodes on the wilderness reservations.

Chapter 1.2 shows one member of the species with no name of its own. It sits in its web while Portia works the edge of the strands, feeding it false signals about prey. It twitches once or twice and will not be drawn out.

Hunting and prey

Scytodes specializes in catching and eating jumping spiders, and the hunt in chapter 1.2 turns on that. A frontal attack would be fatal, because the spit reaches Portia before her fangs reach the Scytodes, so she plots a course that brings her down on it from above.

The male of her species steps onto the web first, moving like a scrap of drifting leaf, then bounces and dances the signal for trapped prey. The Scytodes moves, Portia drops behind it and bites, and the poison stops it quickly.

Against numbers the odds turn. In chapter 2.2 a troop of eight Spitters comes down off their web to hunt along the trail of a kill that Portia and Bianca have just made. Their eyesight is weak, and Portia and her kin are quick and clever enough to anticipate and dodge a net or two, but eight nets make escape a poor bet. Portia signals the retreat, with gestures large and slow enough for the Spitters’ inferior eyes to read. They hold off, spitting nothing and showing only a minimal threat. Sometimes they follow when they have the numbers, and then it is fast flight or a turn and an ambush.

History with Portia’s kind

The spitting spiders have marched in step with Portia’s kin since their small beginnings. The two species have clashed over untold generations, each time with more understanding of the enemy, and both now hold the other as something less than kin and something more than prey.

To Portia they are the big, shambling killers always at the edge of her world, and their unseen presence keeps hatchlings from straying far from the nest. She does not take them for beasts, only for something that has not arrived where she has. Chapter 2.6 says the same in colder terms: the Spitters are a low example of the planet’s thinking species, barely removed from a state of brute nature, and yet to look into their small, weak eyes is to recognize “a thing of intellect”, and so a danger.

In chapter 3.12 the comparison is blunt. A captive giant, the scholars decide, is “no more intelligent than a Paussid beetle or a Spitter, and perhaps less”.

Wilderness reservations

In chapter 5.4 the Spitters stand for the life the spiders have left behind. Fabian tells Portia that if the spiders prized what is natural, they would still be hunting Spitters in the wilderness, or falling to the jaws of ants, instead of mastering their world.

They are still there in chapter 7.10, as the neo-Scytodes on their wilderness reservations, and they may see the images of the human landing sent out by the seeing eye colonies. The spiders never did wipe out the Spitters, just as they never exterminated the ants, a decision that later became the basis of their growing technology.

Unanswered questions

• Whether Spitters can read the spiders’ signals, or have a language of their own. Portia did not know, and made her gestures plain on the chance that they could.
• Where the wilderness reservations are, and how the Spitters live on them.
• How far the nanovirus has taken them. They are called uplifted and also barely removed from brute nature.
• Whether the Scytodes of chapter 1.2 and the neo-Scytodes of chapter 7.10 are one population at different times, or two.