Title: Eight Legged Wonders

Author: James O'Hanlon (White man, successful scientist and author)

Genre: Nonfiction

Book published: 2024 and Read: Early January 2026

Reason for reading: Saw it at my hometown library

I'm not including a (real) picture of the cover anywhere on this site because it's literally just a close up of a spider and 3am me wouldn't appreciate that. One of my biggest takeaways is that there's more known spider species (over 50,000) than known mammal species (around 6,000). In fact, this is true for a lot of insects. Anyways, as you can imagine, this means a large range of very weird and very diverse spiders exist, including ones that look like ants, one type that's vegan, one that actually shoots silk from it's abdomen (most spiders release silk via gravity), one that cartwheels to get around, many that scare me when I look at them, and much more. Most types are non-venomous, yet still somehow a couple years ago 2 of the venomous types (Brown recluse and black widow) were found in my dad's garage. This book changed my opinion on spiders, and now for the most part I don't consider myself to be scared of them. I mean- I'm scared of any I find in my dad's garage, but other than that they seem cool.