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[hjd_uk]

It has 10 legs? Is it a type of scorpion?

Well a google shows its a "Solifugid" not a spider, doesnt spin webs and doesn't (in most cases) have venom, good lord i wouldn't want to meet one though.

[ASCIt]

Also, it has a rather nasty bite.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

put a warning on that, it caught me off guard.

[Shinziril]

Interestingly, from reading the Wikipedia article, it seems that camel spiders don't actually have venom- their bite is powerful enough that they don't need it (which, admittedly, isn't very reassuring).  The nastiness is just from the wound getting infected, as puncture wounds often do. 

[Loud Whispers]

Yet more reasons we should keep cats in the butcheries. MOAR SPIDERS

[wierd]

I pasture them on the food stockpile, so that only food destroying vermin are killed.

When the cats explode, they are conveniently located near to the butcher shop.  Delicious kitten meat get stored in the stockpile, and all is well.

[Garath]

turn off automatic webcollecting in the orders menu and stop complaining. Now at least you have silk for strange moods without buying it or hoping a cavern has vermin webs.

[wierd]

Don't misunderstand....

I am unhappy about only 2 things:

1) a brown recluse produces a 'web' the size of a dime. That is at the largest. To make a single silk sock, you would need a mountain of them.

2) the silk is worthless, pretty much. Worth less than pigtail cloth without improvement modifiers. Masterwork recluse silk cloth is worth a whopping 90 urists. Given the novelty of the stuff, I think it should at least be the same as pigtail. (I can get 160 urists for masterwork pigtail cloth.)

I don't mind vermin silk, as long as the above is not true.  The silk making vermin need to actually vmake a reasonable amount of silk for their species, and the value of the silk should go up proportional to the rarity.

Eg, recluse spider silk socks should be crazy expensive.  Recluse spiders should have the rate of web spawning be abysmally low, to better approximate the effect of small web making.

Silking vermin isn't the problem. Absurd silk is the problem.

[NW_Kohaku]

Unlike giant cave spiders, brown recluse spiders are real-world creatures, so you can more reasonably ask for more realistic behavior.

Spiders in general don't behave the way that they really should, considering.  Like I was saying before, spiders tend to exist on a spectrum between jumping spiders (which have no webbing, but have great eyesight and can move quickly and rely upon hunting and outrunning prey) and orb-weavers (which are slow, weak, clumsy, but have extremely good web-spinning capabilities and rely upon their webs and paralytic venom exclusively for food).  Either spiders should lay down webs, but be slow-moving themselves, or else they should be fast and powerful, but not have those webs.

There's a sort of Spiderman idea in the heads of most people where an ability any spider has is shared by every single spider, like how bumblebees provide honey in quantities comparable to honeybees in this game.

[AWdeV]

I'll just go ahead and one-up you by mentioning my current fort started out with brown recluse spider man webs lying around.  My CMD got a lot of experience and a glorious all-round crafting career from that!

I didn't know they weren't proficient spinners though. Not that it matters much, Toady did do a heckuvalot of research on actual interesting things like syndromes and venom.

[wierd]

Some spiders are a little of both, creating "catch nets" instead of elaborate static webs.

They spin a small, tube-like and highly elastic 'web', which they attach to their front legs. They then hang from overhead, and anchor themselves with a heavy dragline bungeecord. When a scurrying ground beetle, ant, or other prey insect goes below them, they snap the web down on them, and basically "gunnysack" their little bug butts.

Examples are this beauty (second half), which had to be filmed with a high speed camera.

I would love to see other kinds of fast moving giant spider in DF, especially in the cavern layers. A giant version of the netcasting kind that inhabits the high ceilings of the cavern system, and is able to ensnare and cocoon an unwary dwarf would be awesome.

[Pokon]

Most spider species are highly territorial, and will eat each other on sight, or steal each other's prey.

That said, there are a few species that create enormous communal webs.

"Worst. Embark. Ever. Urist, turn around and head to the Brook of Vomit. Probably safer."

[wierd]

Elf cancels bang tree. Interrupted by swarm of angry spiders.

Elf cancels flee from angry spiders: webbed.

[Girlinhat]

Are you kidding?  Embark has 12 foot long exploding flying spiders and we'll love that shit so much we'll name the fort after it!

[NW_Kohaku]

Some spiders are a little of both, creating "catch nets" instead of elaborate static webs.

That's what I meant by a "spectrum" - orb-weavers are on one extreme end, and jumping spiders are on the other.  There are other types of spiders that take up positions in the spectrum somewhere between the extremes.

I use these types of spiders in talking about evolution somewhat frequently, because it illustrates a point, at that.  People tend to get this idea that evolution always goes "onward" and that it "progresses" and is moving towards some "perfect animal", but that's not how evolution really works - it just adapts species to different niches.

Orb-weaver spider webs are nearly invisible, but nearly immobile, and only work against flying insects.  They are slow and clumsy and nearly blind, so they just spin a web and wait for fliers to get caught.  Crawling insects simply don't crawl on a orb-web, so they never get caught.

Jumping spiders have good eyesight, powerful legs, and can simply run down a crawling insect.  They hunt crawling insects because no matter how well they can jump, most flying insects are just plain going to stay out of range of a spider they can see.  So they focus on crawlers.

Each is adapted to hunting a class of insect, but here's the thing - when one class of insects becomes more common, spiders start evolving to "switch sides" to hunt after the more plentiful types of food.  Web-spinners might spin less elaborate webs, and try to instead regain their speed and eyesight by first become trap-door spiders that ambush crawling insects.  Jumping spiders who have forgone their web-spinning for thousands or even millions of generations may try to spin small nets they can carry with their legs and catch their flying prey by jumping and snagging some prey that way.

They evolve back and forth however often they need to in order to take advantage of the most common forms of prey.  The spiders that are between the two extremes are either hedging their bets, or in the middle of evolving to a more specialized predator.