Chef Spider
From Reach
Contents |
Morphology
Chef spiders are small, industrious nocturnal scavengers. Their bodies measure 3-5 centimeters across, with a head in the center. 10 many jointed legs, each almost 6cm in length, extend from the sides of the body, and are used to scurry across the surface, burrow into the ground, and to bury food. Chef spiders have a curious penchant for cooked meat, and go to great lengths to get it. During the night, chef spiders scurry across the surface, seeking carcasses of animals that died during the day. Only very specific bodies will suit the chef spider, these picky eaters will ignore anything too charred or decayed, to the point of starvation. If it can find cooked meat, it will feast, but what it does with raw meat is most interesting. Taking small chunks of food with it, a Chef spider will burrow several meters, leave the chunk, and surface to get more meat. It repeats this cycle, burrowing morsel after morsel until dawn approaches. At this time, the chef spider will burrow several meters below it's food cache, and sleep until sunset. Slowly, the heat from the sun sinks down to the level of the cache, gradually cooking the tiny morsels in an improvised oven. That night, the spider will dig up it's now cooked cache and feast.
Life Cycle
Male chef spiders fertilize females early in their lives. If the female manages to produce a large enough cache, she will lay several thousand eggs beneath it, and promptly die. The eggs incubate and hatch the next night, and the hatchlings instinctively burrow upwards, quickly finding the freshly cooked cache in a violent frenzy. Hatchlings often kill each other in this first feeding, and those hatchlings that die are left at the cache depth to be cooked for tomorrow's meal. This cycle repeats until a few hundred hatchlings are left, which spread out and begin to scavenge for food of their own.
Hazards
Chef spiders are generally harmless pests. They're an annoying source of spoilage in the desert, but they're still the bottom of the desert food chain.
Miscellaneous
Chef spiders are an important food source for Squibs.
