Melinda Brasher spends her time writing, traveling, and hiking. Her talents include navigating by old-fashioned map, mashing multiple languages together in foreign train stations, and dealing cards really, really fast. You can find her work in Zombies Need Brains Presents, The Mantelpiece, Uncharted, and other magazines. Visit her online at www.melindabrasher.com or on Facebook as Melinda Brasher, Writer.
The Trouble with Vegan Spiders
by Melinda Brasher
At Claire’s old school back on Earth, no one ever burst into the science lab, wild-eyed and wild-haired, yelling “Emergency biology lesson! Right now!” and then running out like she had an angry unicorn hot on her heels. But that’s what Miss Elizabeth had just done. Again.
Claire grabbed her exploration pack and followed. School was way better here. And seventh grade was the best yet.
“Gloves?” Miss Elizabeth asked, already at the wheel of the muddy tractor cart.
Allie and Takumi had caught up and all three dug through their packs. “Gloves, check.”
“Bio-filter masks?”
“Check.”
“Specimen collection kits? First aid? Protein pellets?”
“Everything’s here, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Good. Get in.”
Claire claimed the front seat and wedged her exploration pack in beside her. It smelled sweaty. She should have washed it after their last emergency biology lesson. Hopefully this one wouldn’t involve quite so much running. “Where are we going?” A deep cave, maybe, where a tiger with three-foot fangs had just been discovered? The bluffs, to hunt flowers that bloomed for only one day?
Miss Elizabeth hit the accelerator. “The farm.”
“We’re going home?” Biggest let-down ever. “Why?”
“Spiders.”
“Real spiders?”
“Everything’s real, Claire.”
“You know what I mean. Spiders like Earth spiders?” The tractor cart hit a rut and Claire grabbed a handle so the next rut wouldn’t bounce her out. “Is it at least some new spider? Carnivorous? Deadly, maybe?”
“No. Pretty sure they’re still herbivorachnids.”
Wimpy plant-eating spidery things that weren’t half as cool as Earth spiders. Their venom was weak—a bunch of digestive enzymes but not a lot of actual toxins. Even their webs were kind of stupid, just to make bridges between plants and catch blowing seeds and leaves to liquefy and drink like vegetarian vampires.
Claire had done a field study and a 3,000-word investigation of herbivorachnids for her sixth-grade final biology project last year. She’d rather have studied something more exciting, like Miss Elizabeth’s scorpion that caused super-realistic hallucinations.
“Is it a new species, at least?” Claire asked.
“Don’t think so. Your brother says they look like camo spiders.”
“What? Camos aren’t an emergency.”
Miss Elizabeth looked right at her. “These are.”
*
When they pulled up, Claire’s older brother Ryan was holding his computer to the bobbing wheat, blasting high-pitched bird calls from the device. The wheat didn’t look right: fuzzy, more green than gold. Claire jumped out and ran toward Ryan.
The closer she got, the stranger it looked. Then she realized: every stalk, every head, was covered, absolutely covered by camo spiders. Tiny ones, writhing like the tar monster in her second-favorite cinema game…but a tar monster made of hundreds of splotchy spiders, their green-gold camouflage doing no good when you couldn’t even see the wheat head below.
“Are they babies?” Claire wondered. All camo spiders she’d ever seen were much bigger.
“Good hypothesis.” Miss Elizabeth came up right behind her. “What does a good hypothesis need?”
“A lot of testing,” Claire answered dutifully. “But maybe after we get them off the wheat?” Farming was boring, but Claire knew how important it was, especially here, where there were exactly two farms on the entire planet. And if Earth scrapped the colonization project, after the disaster with the other ships in Claire’s convoy and the aborted second and third waves, there might never be more than these two farms. “We need to save the crops first.”
Miss Elizabeth sighed. “I suppose study will have to wait. So, why isn’t the bird call working? Hypothesize!”
Camo spiders had plagued their crops for a while, but as part of her field study, Claire discovered a drab-looking bird that loved to eat the big, juicy spiders. She named it “spider wren,” recorded the bird’s calls, played them back at the camos trying to eat her crops, and… voila! The spiders fled. She got an A-plus. Her mom moved arachnid pesticides down the priority list. And for helping save the colony’s food supply? The biggest serving of fruit and custard at community night.
“You’re playing the right recording?” Claire asked Ryan.
“I’m not an idiot. The field speakers had no effect, so I’ve been using different frequencies, changing the volume. Nothing. “
Takumi raised his hand. He was always doing that even when they weren’t really in class.
“Yes, Takumi?” Miss Elizabeth asked.
“Maybe they’re a different species that just mimic camo spiders.”
Claire leaned in close. That faint sour smell met her, like forgotten vegetable sticks turning to slime in the back of the fridge. “Smells like a camo.” She poked with one finger.
A whole clump of spiders jumped onto her hand and scurried up her arm. Behind her, Allie screeched. Claire flailed her arm, trying to get rid of the nasty creatures. Half clung on tight, and she could feel their little legs and their little nibbling mouths. “I’m not a plant!” She swiped her other hand along her arm, scraping off the squirmy monsters. Even when they were gone, Claire felt itchy and jumpy.
“You okay?” Allie asked.
“Fine.” Claire would die before letting anyone see her creeped out by plant-eating spiders. “They look like camos, Miss Elizabeth, but they’re springier than the big ones.”
“Gloves on, collection kits out!” Miss Elizabeth called.
While Ryan tried playing other recorded bird calls, Claire and Takumi reached into the masses with gloved hands and collection nets. The spiders didn’t seem to care much, just rearranging themselves into different clumps around Claire’s hands. Her skin still prickled. Allie squealed, but she too managed to get some specimens in her box.
Under high magnification they looked exactly like camo spiders, down to their eight eyes and the short fangs on the ends of their hairy chelicerae.
“What do you think, Claire?” Miss Elizabeth asked. “You are the world’s leading expert on camo spiders.”
Claire rolled her eyes. It wasn’t hard to be the world’s leading expert on anything when there were only twenty-four other people on the whole planet. But it was still kind of cool. “I think we need to test them.” They prepared samples and ran them through the DNA analyzer. “Species match,” Claire confirmed.
Birds still squawked and cooed electronically from Ryan’s computer and made the weird horsey cries that some birds here made, while thousands of spiders kept eating the wheat undisturbed. Herbivorachnids moved like Earth spiders. Had nearly matching anatomy. But Earth spiders hunted insects and other arachnids, often paralyzing them with deadly poison and sucking out their guts. Appropriately creepy. New Eden herbivorachnids were the embarrassing vegan cousins of real spiders. But Earth spiders never absolutely destroyed your crops. So, which was scarier, really?
Ryan shook his computer, as if that would make the bird calls work any better. Always before, the call had sent them scurrying down the stalks and away. Or floating off on strings of spider silk. Or hiding and then escaping.
“You’ve never had an infestation anywhere near this scale, right?” Miss Elizabeth asked.
“Never. Often four or five big ones together—and they can eat quite a bit—but nothing like this.”
Takumi raised his hand again. He was the world’s leading expert on a slug he’d named after himself, but which lived in the forest and hadn’t yet bothered any of their crops. He’d only earned an A-minus for his field study.
Miss Elizabeth called on him.
“Maybe the camos have babies in hoards so predators can’t get them all.”
Predators. Babies. An idea burst like fireworks in Claire’s head. If the big ones were adults, that meant they’d obviously survived babyhood. If the adults got scared by the sound of spider wrens, but young ones didn’t… and if even the adults didn’t all flee the same way…
“Just a hypothesis.” Claire didn’t care if Miss Elizabeth and the others laughed at her. “What if they’re smart?”
Miss Elizabeth’s fingers twitched. “Explain.”
“Maybe the old ones run from the bird call because they know what it means… because they have experience. What if it’s not so much instinct, but learning?”
Miss Elizabeth was almost dancing in place. “Continue.”
“Maybe the little ones just haven’t learned to be scared. You know, because no birds have tried to eat them. When I was doing my field study, some big ones hid and waited for a gap in the bird calls—and then made a dash for it. I thought it was clever. But others just ran… and sometimes got eaten. Maybe the hiders learned a better strategy.”
“Fascinating hypothesis. How do you test it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we need an actual spider wren. If it starts eating them, maybe they’ll learn and run off. And if not, the bird will at least eat a few of our problems.”
Soon the entire colony—even the governor—was out with computers, playing possible mating calls, hoping to summon spider wrens. The sky had taken on that weird green tinge that always made Claire think a storm was coming—though that’s not usually what it meant here. Meanwhile, the spiders marched slowly over the wheat like a giant vacuum cleaner, leaving only husks and stems. And no birds came to the rescue.
“We’re losing too much wheat,” Claire’s dad declared, back from checking the other fields. No spiders there. Yet. “We’ve got to get them off.”
They all gloved up, put on mud boots, and started scooping spiders by the armload into bags.
“Gross!” Allie said every thirty seconds. Or “Eww.” But she didn’t quit. The spiders didn’t quit eating. And the non-farmers didn’t seem to realize this was the type of last-ditch effort that never worked well.
No matter how smart or stupid the spiders were, they had to have a “run” instinct in them somewhere. But how to activate it? Claire scraped another cooperative clump of spiders into her bag. Several clung happily to her glove. “Wait, Allie, I want to try something. When I say ‘go,’ play the spider wren call.”
Allie, happy to stop spider-scooping, pulled out her computer. “Ready.”
“Go.”
The sound played and Claire brought her hands together on one head of wheat, squishing dozens of spiders.
“Poor little guys,” Allie moaned—even though she’d just been complaining about how gross they were.
The surviving spiders roiled a bit but settled right back down. Not nearly as afraid of her as they should be. Claire motioned to Allie. “Again.” Bird call. Squishing spiders.
She’d heard once that intelligence was learning from your mistakes, but wisdom was learning from other people’s mistakes. Hypothesizing that spiders were wise was going a bit too far, even for a new planet like this, with giant jabbers who got happy when you sang to them, felines who walked around on two legs figuring out how to steal shiny things, and ratty creatures who worked with scorpiony creatures to hunt prey much bigger than themselves. Anything was possible here. Sometimes that scared her a little, though she never told anyone. Mostly it made her feel like an adventurer in a cinema game so imaginative no one had yet imagined it.
Maybe New Eden spiders weren’t just wimpy, plant-eating imitations of real Earth spiders. Maybe they were wimpy, plant-eating wise imitations who could learn from the gruesome deaths of others. She gave the spiders her sternest look and readied her hands. “Pay attention now, little guys. Allie, play it again.”
The fourth time, a few spiders who narrowly escaped her smashing hands skittered away, some hiding under wheat heads and others running halfway down the stalks before creeping slowly back up. She held her breath.
Miss Elizabeth had stopped working to watch.
The sixth time, the nearest spiders ran from Claire’s hands right before she brought them together.
“Stop mucking around and keep up!” Claire’s dad yelled. Each pair of spider-baggers had an imaginary line they were supposed to be moving along, pushing straight into the field as they scooped, trampling some wheat in order to save the rest. Her dad and brother were several feet in, but Claire and Allie were still near the edge.
“Hold on. We’re doing science.”
“I need you to do work. Get those spiders into bags. Now.”
“Just a couple of minutes. I might be onto something. Like when I figured out how to keep the big ones away.”
“This isn’t like the last infestation, Claire.” His voice sounded high, his eyes bulged, and she realized how scared he was. Too scared to see that bagging spiders was never going to solve the problem—only delay the worst. “A little bird song isn’t going to do the trick.”
Claire’s throat tightened. She had to make this work, or they might lose the whole harvest. “Then let me figure out a new trick. Please.”
“Two minutes. Then you start scooping.”
Miss Elizabeth gave Claire a conspiring wink from the next line over. Did she realize quite how serious this was?
“Again,” Claire motioned to Allie, who fumbled for at least three seconds before getting the bird calls to play. Then they both focused. Just her and Allie and the ticking time and the enemy spiders, like two heroes on a mission. Bird call, clap, squish, bird call, clap, squish…and more and more spiders started reacting.
After the ninth time, spiders started running before her shadow crossed them, before her deadly hands got within a foot of their tiny bodies. They streamed down the stalks and along the ground away from Allie’s computerized bird calls. Claire’s heart started up a party in her chest, beating away the fear.
She stood back completely “Okay, just play it.”
The bird call sounded, and even more spiders started fleeing.
“Yes!” Claire shouted.
Allie bounced on her feet. “We taught them to run from birds!”
Miss Elizabeth dropped her bag, spilling spiders all over her boots. She didn’t seem to notice. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” But her words moved way faster than she did, blurring all together. “Maybe you taught them—Maybe you just mimicked a key stimulus well enough to trigger a fixed action pattern—Maybe different populations have different predators and must learn their flight trigger based on observed outcomes and you just hastened the process or—I—I don’t know.” She paused for breath. “Isn’t this wonderful?”
It was kind of wonderful, even though the spiders on the other stalks kept dissolving the colony’s food supply into their stomachs and Claire’s gloves were covered in spider guts.
“We need a control group,” Miss Elizabeth declared. “We need a way to introduce variables slowly and isolate reactions and—”
“Two minutes are up,” Claire’s dad called.
“You have to come see this!” Claire answered.
“You have a solution?”
“Well… maybe.”
Claire’s dad wasn’t big into science that couldn’t be made useful immediately. Could she make this useful enough?
He came over, glare-scowling like he did when Claire forgot some boring farm chore. Then his face completely changed. “Are they running? On their own?” He grabbed his computer, moved back to his own line, and played the song. No reaction from the ones close to him, but some of the spiders near Claire and Allie started running.
“Here, watch,” Claire approached her dad’s uncooperative spiders. “You have to teach them.”
Miss Elizabeth cleared her throat.
“Or, um, trigger a key reaction-action whatever. Just watch.” She and Allie played the call and squished more spiders, over and over, while her dad muttered and shifted on his feet. Yet she and Allie continued playing and squishing until… the same results. “It’s replicable, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Replicable!” Miss Elizabeth nearly cheered. That was one of the requirements for real scientific research that she was always going on about—though for true replication they’d have to have other people replicate it. Which is what Claire planned to do right now.
But Claire’s dad grunted. “It’s very slow.”
“Slow is relative,” Miss Elizabeth argued happily. “Effective is what we should worry about. And applicable to future defense.”
Claire’s dad looked over to where Governor Wainwright was scooping spiders—not bossing, just letting Claire and Allie figure things out—which was kind of annoying and flattering at the same time.
“The governor likes innovation,” Claire said.
Her dad threw up his hands. “Fine. Just be sure you keep up.”
Miss Elizabeth looked at Takumi. “Ready to replicate?”
“Ready.”
Claire and Allie pushed farther into the field and tried it again. Success! Miss Elizabeth and Takumi took longer but cheered when it started to work. Soon the spiders started running after fewer repetitions—and from farther away. “Miss Elizabeth, what if they’re releasing warning pheromones or something?” Claire didn’t say communicating because Miss Elizabeth might just about die of excitement.
“Then we should spread out!” Miss Elizabeth abandoned her post and dragged Takumi farther away, his head almost disappearing beneath the spidery wheat.
Claire and Allie were soon moving faster than the spider-scoopers. “Nothing can stop Black Cape and Hammer Sage,” Claire whispered. Allie beamed and adjusted her imaginary hammer. This wasn’t as fun as a 5D level of their favorite crime-fighting super-duo cinema game, but the realness made it even more exciting. It was the best thing about New Eden.
Soon everyone abandoned their bags and started imitating Claire and Allie. Most of their spider students fled into the green and purple woods where nature could take its normal course—whatever that was—but some crept back onto stalks they’d already cleared of other spiders.
“Like herding cats,” Claire’s dad complained, but not too grumpily.
It took the whole colony all afternoon and evening to convince thousands and thousands of spiders to run from spider wren calls.
They played the sound off and on all night through the field speakers, just as they did for regular camos. Claire took her turn on night watch and had to wake Allie up to battle two more mini spider invasions. By the third watch, no one had to wake anyone up. The border between field and woods stayed quiet.
Claire woke to a squintingly bright early morning sky. Entire swaths of wheat had been devoured. It would mean another winter of having to be very, very careful with food. But it could have been much worse. They’d saved a decent share of the crop, and now at least they knew how to fight the next infestation, though it was too early in the morning to think about more battles, no matter how valiant and glorious.
Miss Elizabeth, hair even wilder than usual, called Claire, Allie, and Takumi together for an after-sunrise lesson wrap-up, gesturing and happy and way too awake: “Possibilities we have here: a coordinated hatching, pheromonal communication, spiders that may be able to learn! What certainties do we have?”
“None,” Claire and her classmates chorused sleepily.
“Forget the rest of your lessons today. Work together to formulate three coherent hypotheses and then design experiments to test them. We’ll put them into action this afternoon. We have the first samples we collected, and I’m sure we can find some lingering spiders in the woods.”
Claire and Allie groaned. But they didn’t really mean it. Emergency biology lessons were pretty cool.
Takumi raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“What if the camos come back? If they’re so smart, maybe they’ll figure out that the bird calls are fake. Or they’ll sneak into some other field like ninjas and scoop up food without us even noticing. Or they’ll work together to short out the field speakers—like rats in that story I read once.”
Takumi’s imagination was going for a ride. Spiders learning that something was dangerous and figuring out they should run… that was a far cry from teaming up to perform some complicated heist.
Right?
“Form a hypothesis and an experiment,” Miss Elizabeth repeated, her cheeriness wobbling a bit. “Just remember that ‘smart’ is not a scientific term, and ascribing human qualities and abilities to animals without adequate proof is bad science.”
Take that, Takumi-who-rains-on parades. Camos might be insect-level smart. But they couldn’t possibly be ninja-level smart. And as everyone had just seen, Claire and Allie could deal with insect-level smart.
*
When Claire’s dad came back from his inspection of all the fields, he put a hand on her shoulder. “Nice work. But after this, your mother is going to move arachnid pesticides back up the priority list. And you’re going to help her.”
So science was useful now, huh? Figured. But her dad kept his hand there on her shoulder for a long time, and she didn’t bother squirming out from under it.
*
To celebrate their victory, the colony had an impromptu community night—but in the morning—right at the farm, eating plates of drabchicken eggs and pancakes. Governor Wainwright’s long boring speech wasn’t actually very long, and not very boring, since it was mostly about Claire herself, and how even more wheat could have been saved if everyone had acted faster and smarter, like her and Allie, and how the colonists were like cogs in a blah blah blah. Claire got the most pancakes of anyone, with one spoonful of actual strawberry jam, brought all the way from Earth and presented only on special occasions.
Maybe being the world’s leading expert on camo spiders was worth something.
Copyright 2024 by Melinda Brasher