Real Life Atlach-Nacha

"... Ralibar Vooz departed .. the way steepened more and more; and it ran through chambers that were too vast for the searching of sight; and along precipices that fell sheer for an unknown distance ... on the verge of a chasm whose farther shore was lost in darkness ... Ralibar Vooz went close to the verge and saw that great webs were attached to it at intervals, seeming to span the gulf with their multiple crossing and reticulations of gray, rope thick strands. ... "O Atlach-Nacha, I am the gift sent by Tsathoggua."

Lovecraft's friend, Clark Ashton Smith, created Atlach-Nacha in his short story "The Seven Geases" (1934). As theory goes, Atlach-Nacha resembles a huge spider and dwells in a huge cavern deep beneath a mountain in the now vanished kingdom of Hyperborea (also the palyground of R E Howard's Conan) in the Arctic. It spins a gigantic web, bridging a massive chasm between the Dreamlands and the waking worldand when the web is complete, the end of the world will come.

Here at the HPLblog, Chrispy brings to you the most alien images of Nature - the real world is stranger than we can imagine. However, when we get there, Lovecraft and his friends have shown us part of the way, through the glass darkly.




Gigantic spider's web discovered in Madagascar
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

This new species spins the world's longest web over 82 feet by some odd insect engineering. Known as the Darwin's bark spider it even builds its enormous web across rivers. It's not yet understood how.

news link here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9001000/9001866.stm

Spider Silk Rug and more ...

Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious; for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms. ... Dreams in the Witch House



Chrispy is on a spider kick this week. Get ready to get freaked, becuase the image above is of a rug done in 100% spider web silk. Ia!!

From: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/newscripts/87/8741newscripts.html

During the rainy seasons of the past four years, scores of workers in Madagascar spent their days collecting more than a million female GOLDEN ORB SPIDERS (Nephila madagascariensis) from telephone and electrical wires. The collectors passed the arachnids to handlers, who placed them into harnesses and then drew out their silk on hand-cranked devices—all while trying not to get bitten by the maple-leaf-sized web weavers.

At this point, humans took over the weaving, making individual threads by twining together somewhere between 96 and 960 spider-silk filaments. From these emerged a beautifully patterned hand-woven 11- by 4-foot cloth that now stands as the world’s largest single textile made of spider silk.

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And what makes spider silk sticky? From the 14 September 2009 Chemical and Engineering News (p.28)

Adhesiver proteins ... the University of Wyoming ... discovered a pair of spider genes that code for adhesive glycoproteins ... the scientists went to great length ... catching spiders in barns and collecting 100 webs ... the researchers sequenced the sticky substnace by mass spectrometry ...

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What would Lovecraft say?

Giant Spider Discovered

A new "giant" orb spider was recently discovered in Africa and Madagascar. The females of the species have a leg span of up to 5 inches, and are thought to be the largest web spinning spider known to science. More at BBC News.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8316720.stm

Oldest "Spider" Found

But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all because it alone had conquered the secret of time. - The Shadow Out of Time, HPL.
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23 December 2008

The species once described as the world's oldest spider is a more primitive version of the web-spinning modern spider, scientists have found.

Most of what the group initially found among fossil remains belonged to a group of extinct arachnids called trigonotarbids, but one bit seemed to have the modified hairs called spigots from which spider silk emerges, as well as the external, flexible appendages known as spinnerets that facilitate web-spinning.

That led the group to believe they were looking at the world's oldest known spider.

The process of identifying the fossilised spider parts started with solid rock that was dissolved in acid, leaving behind organic matter that was sifted through to determine which belong to animals or plants.

"They're all microscopic fragments. What you've got is a jigsaw puzzle, with half the pieces and no picture on the box lid," Professor Selden said.

"You don't know what it's going to be if you haven't got all the pieces, so having these additional pieces means it changed the idea of what it was."

The finding is important for evolutionary biologists trying to unravel the origin of spider silk.

To clean up the incomplete record of different species, the team has suggested a new order be instituted, containing the Attercopus and Permarachne species.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7795897.stm