Giant spider
A Giant spider is an introductory
monster in RuneScape that fights with ranged attacks. They come in a variety of
levels, and are weak to crush attacks, so a mace or warhammer will dispatch
them quickly, although any melee weapon can be used. They have moderate
resistance to ranged and high magic resistance, and will range the player right
back if attacked with these styles, so training these skills on them is not
advised.
Many new players kill the level 4
giant spiders to train combat because of their low combat level and close
location to the starting point in Lumbridge. They primarily attack with ranged.
The level 48 spiders are rarely
trained on, and are aggressive. They also use ranged in combat.
The level 57 Giant spiders are
fairly accurate and can hit up to 74 LP if you have low defence, so it is
recommended that players wear at least full rune armour and bring food (filling
the inventory with food is recommended as the spiders drop nothing).
Alternatively, members can bring a Bunyip, Saradomin Godsword, Unicorn
Stallion, or a full set of Guthans to heal with. The level 57 Giant spiders
have 1425 hp and fight with ranged. Unlike their level 4 and 48 cousins, however,
they do NOT drop anything, not even charms.
There have been rumors
circulating on the Internet of a spider large enough to eat people’s dogs and
cats… While it should be obvious that such an animal would not be discovered
out of the blue, and the poorly done photoshop job should be a hint, apparently
many people have fallen for this. So I figured why not do a debunking and talk
about something that I love, spiders.
To start with the photo, there
are VERY clear signs that it was photoshopped, and poorly at that. And even if
the photoshop had resulted in a masterpiece of deception, the image simply
doesn’t make sense; the shape, body type, location, behavior, none of it.
More interesting than any of that
though, is that there are real limits to how large spiders can actually get,
based primarily on the (relative) ineffectiveness of their “lungs”, among other
factors. They simply can’t grow past a certain size in relation to the oxygen
content in the atmosphere, or they wouldn’t survive.
Most spiders possess what are
called “book lungs“, which are completely unrelated to what we normally call
lungs, and developed independently. And from fossil evidence, we can determine
that these structures have remained more or less unchanged throughout the past
400 million years because of how effective they are. There are downsides/limits
to them though, with relation to lungs as we know them. As body size increases
in relation to gas molecule size, they become less effective. This means that
as animals with these structures get bigger they become less and less effective
at “breathing”, which places limits on their maximum size.
Other limits to their maximum
body size include a decreasing effectiveness and durability of their
exoskeleton and muscular system, as they get larger they generally need to
become thicker to compensate for this (especially highly-mobile spiders),
tarantulas are a good example of this.
The two largest spiders alive in
the world today are both approaching the limits of maximum spider size, in the
current atmosphere anyways, perhaps not in the distant past. They are the foot
long Goliath bird-eater tarantula, and the Giant Huntsman in Vietnam. Neither
of these come close to approaching the size of the “Angolan Witch Spider”.