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CNN Live At Daybreak

Imagine Being the Real Deal Spiderman

Aired May 09, 2002 - 05:55   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Toby Maguire has moviegoers' heads spinning as America's new favorite superhero. But he just plays the part of Spider-Man. Imagine being the real deal.

CNN's Beth Nissen introduces us to a man who lives and breathes spiders -- over a million of them.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Norm Platnick is a Spider-Man.

NORM PLATNICK: Now this is a nice spider.

NISSEN: He's the spider curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

PLATNICK: We have the world's largest collection of spiders; well over a million specimens here.

NISSEN: Fifty thousand of them are in his office, preserved in little vials and mason jars. Most of these spiders are tiny. He has some bigger ones in the hall.

PLATNICK: Spiders can be as small as the period at the end of a sentence or as large as a dinner plate leg span.

NISSEN: He likes spiders.

PLATNICK: They're nice animals.

NISSEN: Animals? Most people think spiders are insects.

PLATNICK: Not at all. Insects have six legs. A totally different group of arthropods.

NISSEN: All spiders have eight legs, and all spiders spin silk, wondrous stuff.

PLATNICK: A strand of spider silk has a tensile strength that's greater than steel at the same diameter.

NISSEN: Yet highly elastic.

PLATNICK: Spider silk can easily stretch to three or four times its original dimensions and then snap back.

NISSEN: Only about half of all spiders weave webs, and those aren't always the Halloween style or the webs. There are also sheet webs and funnel webs. Spiders use webs to catch food. They set up sticky, midair traps, drop webs like a net, lasso and tie up prey like a cowboy with a rodeo calf. Spiders that don't weave webs hunt.

PLATNICK: Some are sit and wait hunters; they wait for the prey to come to them. Some are more active; they go out and chase the prey down.

NISSEN: And then start digesting.

PLATNICK: It's rather gory, actually. They'll first inject venom to paralyze it, and then they will secrete digestive enzymes, which liquefy the prey, and then they suck up the liquid.

NISSEN (on camera): Oh.

PLATNICK: Well you have to make a living somehow.

NISSEN (voice-over): They'll eat almost anything they can catch: butterflies, other spiders, even small snakes and fish, but not humans. Although, if threatened, spiders, such as this tarantula, will bite.

PLATNICK: You've got to watch out. You're getting a little too close to the jaws.

NISSEN: There are only two poisonous spiders in North America, the black widow and the brown recluse. Still, many people react to spiders the way a CNN sound man did when this Brazilian tarantula momentarily got away from its handler.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

NISSEN: Those with arachnophobia, fear of spiders, can't avoid them. They're almost everywhere.

PLATNICK: You're probably within seven or eight feet of a spider no matter where you are. The only place on earth that has no spiders at all -- as far as we know -- is Antarctica.

NISSEN: He says, "as far as we know," because so little is known about spiders. Scientists have identified 36,000 species of spider, but they estimate that's only half the actual number.

PLATNICK: And we're destroying their habitat, so that we're losing them before we even know what we're losing.

NISSEN: While many people might say "good riddens" to spiders, Platnick says humans should say, "thank you."

PLATNICK: The fact is, if there were no spiders, we probably wouldn't be here. Spiders eat an enormous number of insects, and without that, the insects would have devoured all our crops long ago. We would have no food.

NISSEN: Something to keep in mind the next time you see a daddy longlegs on the sidewalk or a spider in the bathtub or a cobweb in the corner.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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