“Spiders don’t socialise. Spiders don’t work together. Spiders don’t hunt as packs. Spiders don’t use tools. Spiders don’t organise large structures.

“Because if they did, we’d all be dead.”

— As it turns out, this isn’t quite correct.  Some spiders do work together!  They’re called social spiders, and they cooperate to build large webs that can hold hundreds or even thousands of spiders at once.  There aren’t a lot of them.  There are over 40,000 species of spider, and only 20 or so are social.  Still, they are a thing that exists.

(This is a Halloween post.  So, trigger warnings for — let me think a moment — cannibalism, body horror, and spiders.  Lots and lots of spiders.)

(But also some cool science!)

So, social spiders.  Probably the most famous are Australian Flat Huntsman spiders, because they’re pretty big:

[each of these guys is around 2-3 inches (5-7 cm) long]

But most social spiders are small — sit on your fingernail, type of thing.

[little cuties!]

Their webs can be pretty big, though:

[two meters long, hundreds to thousands of spiders inside]

And it turns out those big webs are effective at catching prey.  Not only do they catch lots of insects, but they can catch bigger insects, and even small vertebrates.

So why aren’t more spiders social?

Because effective is not the same as efficient.  Yes, those big webs can capture more prey.  But they don’t seem to capture more prey per spider.  It’s like, 100 spiders cooperate to build a web, and that web captures 80 times more prey than a single spider could alone.  That’s a net loss!  The average spider is eating 20% less.  The numbers don’t work out.  (And remember, kids, economics are everywhere.)

Okay, but then this just flips the question: if being social is inefficient, why are any spiders social?

The answer seems to be that under certain specific circumstances, being social can still be a net positive.  First, if the spiders are living in a prey-rich environment, with lots and lots of insects buzzing around, this can make the per-spider nutrition hit less painful.  Second, if it’s also a predator-rich environment, the large webs provide significant protection from predators.  And third, if it’s an environment with extremes of weather — one that swings from humid to very dry, or where there are often gusts of strong wind, or sudden heavy rainfalls — the big webs can provide protection and stability.  Spider silk is an excellent insulator, so the inside of a social web will keep a constant temperature, and the spiders don’t have to worry about being washed out or blown away.

So, if environmental conditions are just right, being social becomes a plausible, marginally successful strategy.  It’s still not hugely successful — again, there are only about 20 social species out of ~40,000 — but there is a niche.  The social spiders are taking a hit in nutrition in return for enhanced security.

Of course, this means that while social spiders are more safe, they’re also more hungry.  They’re always hungry.

So, so hungry.

[no, I don’t know either.  I guess kids like reading about hungry spiders.]

Different social spider species deal with this in different ways.  But there’s one particular strategy that has evolved several times, over at least three lineages of social spider.  It’s called matriphagy, from the Latin root mater (mother) and the Greek suffix phage (to eat or feed on).

Yes, there are several species of spider where the baby spiders eat their mothers.  Alive.

Look, from an economic / evolutionary perspective it makes perfect sense.  If there’s a general shortage of calories, it’s the young who suffer first and most.  Everyone may be hungry, but if the colony is going to survive?  You particularly need to make sure the kids get fed.

Also, a lot of spiders are semelparous anyway — meaning, they only breed and give birth once, and then they die.  Like salmon, yes?  Remember Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web?

[did you cry when Charlotte died?  no shame, lots of us did.]

So if you’re checking out anyway, might as well make sure it benefits your kids.

The details, though…  Mm, second trigger warning I guess?

[here’s a Hawaiian Happy Face Spider, and yes it’s a real thing that exists]

Okay so the paper is here.  How it works:  The mother spider eats as much as she can, fattening herself up.  Since the colony is always on short rations, this means that not all females will reproduce.  (Side note: you can imagine how over time this might evolve from “not all females will reproduce” to “only a few females reproduce” to “there’s just one Queen who reproduces”.  The social spiders haven’t gone very far down that road, and maybe they never will, but… yeah, it’s interesting.)

When she’s good and ready, she lays her eggs, then watches them until they hatch.  Then she’ll feed the baby spiderlings by regurgitating food, like a mother bird.  Like semelparity, this is another fairly common spider behavior that’s been, let’s say, adapted to circumstances.  Not all spiders do maternal care, but among the ones that do, brood-feeding is pretty widespread.

[babies swarming around Mom’s mouthparts for a snack, (c) 2015 Mor Salomon]

And here’s where we go out of the blue and into the black.  The act of regurgitating food starts a hormonal cascade within the mother which causes her internal organs to start dissolving.  Furthermore, they dissolve in a very particular order: first peripheral muscles and nerves, then viscera, then the digestive system itself.  The mother literally regurgitates her own internal organs to feed her ravenous children.

And when she can’t give anything more, her babies swarm over her and finish her off.

To make all this even more interesting, the cascade doesn’t start until the babies have hatched and start demanding food.  If the egg sac is removed — say, a probing bird picks it off — the mother keeps living and may lay another egg sac.  If the sac hatches, but the babies are promptly removed, same-same.  But once the process is triggered, it’s irreversible.

And while all this is subjectively gruesome, objectively it makes perfect sense.  The mothers who let themselves get eaten had more babies that survived, and so their genes tended to spread.  It’s a rational economic decision. At the end of the day, the math wins.  The math always wins.

Happy Halloween!

That sentence in the title is a quote from President Crypto Thug in answer to a question from a reporter asking today if he believed North Korea was behind the hack of crypto exchange Binance. Trump went on to tell the reporter, “I’ve always felt it was a little bit dangerous. But they say they have it pretty much under control. We’ll see.”

We saw, you babbling, groveling, dictator-butt-licker. Stories out today said that a team of North Korean hackers was able to use AI tools to rapidly drain $6.3 billion from Binance using “thousands of transactions in a short period...to obscure the trail of funds,” this according to a crypto analytics firm called Chainalysis.

Now, lookee here! Right away in a story about crypto we have the appearance of the word, “funds.” Aren’t “funds” supposed to be real money, as in legal tender that can be used to settle debts and buy food and hard goods such as dishwashers and mowers and clothing you can wear out of the house?

That gives us a hint of what went on with the Binance heist today. A whole bunch of people, probably in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, took real money and turned it over to Binance, which acting as an “exchange,” magically turned the people’s money into billions and billions…no, trillions and trillions…of electrons and sent them out to Arkansas somewhere where they were stored in a building that probably looks like seven Walmarts strung together, in which gigantic air conditioners and water-circulators keep the electrons from bursting into flames and just burning the whole illusory thing to the ground. It is the confusing, hellishly complicated manner of the arrangement of the electrons as blockchains that are supposed to keep the “funds” – remember them? – secure because of the “peer-to-peer” nature of the storage, using verification by “proofs” that can penetrate the blizzard of blockchains and unlock the magic of the storage method and reveal that all those electrons, or some of them anyway, actually represent “funds” that were turned over to the blockchain manager, in this case, Binance.

You will notice the complete and utter absence of anything resembling a bank in this scenario. Banks are those ancient things where you deposit money, and it is held until you want to get it out by writing a check or using a cash card to buy something. If you go into a bank and sign a piece of paper, the banks will even hold the money for you in a “savings account” or a “certificate of deposit” and pay you interest on your money for having given them the privilege of holding onto your money and earning interest on it for themselves through other manners of investment.

That ancient form of money management was deemed intrusive on your interests because the “government” could regulate what was done with your money and how you could deposit it and withdraw it from a bank. So, they invented warehouses that look like ganged-up Walmarts out in Oklahoma and Arkansas and called it “crypto” so you could store your money using electrons in blockchains with its security managed by mutual agreements about verification and secrecy concerning the methodology of penetrating the blockchains to reveal that inside them are your “funds.” Somewhere.

All of which is peachy until squads of North Koreans or somebody else get ahold of AI tools and slap them into laptops and start combing through the Great Electron Stream that is the internet looking for (1) blockchains and (2) the keys they can use to unlock them and extract…there’s that word again…your “funds.”

The great thing about the whole world of crypto for thieves is that nobody sees money anymore, as Trump, a crypto owner and user and trader and exchange manager helpfully pointed out today. That means there is no vault you have to break into using drills and dynamite charges and all the other stuff you used to see in films such as the great Michael Mann masterpiece, “Thief,” and the almost as good “The Italian Job.” Thieves can actually sit in a sweaty room in North Korea, a place where nobody can get to them, and using their fingers, they can steal billions and billions of dollars by penetrating the blockchains that supposedly protect your “funds” and taking those electrons and whisking them away into accounts in which they are stored as real dollars and located God only knows where.

This is madness, of course. Anybody who wants to store their money away in a stream of electrons deserves what’s coming to them. See also: Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who ran another crypto “exchange” called FTX, which was located – where else? – in the Bahamas, until it wasn’t located there anymore because he and several other of the FTX managers were indicted for taking the actual “funds” in their electron streams and fooling around with them until they disappeared, or a lot of them did, anyway.

You would think that after SBF and FTX and Bybit, another crypto exchange hacked by North Koreans for a $1.5 billion loss, that people would kind of sit back and read a few stories in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and take a look and decide, you know what, I think I’ll put my money in a paper sack and keep it in the bottom of my closet with my shoes.

But you would be wrong. Crypto, it seems, will be with us for quite a while, at least until one of those multi-Walmart-looking crypto data centers bursts into flames and a whole bunch of supposedly secure blockchains burn to the ground and people’s “funds” are really, truly, gone for good.

In the meantime, Donald Trump has some shiny crypto he’s ready to sell you through his totally secure, believe me when I tell you, blockchain locker thievery-proof magic storehouse called World Liberty Financial, located – where else? – down in Florida right near Mar a Lago, so Trump and his boys can sit on their patio under their yellow-striped umbrellas and hear the crypto cooling fans whirring, just across the bay.

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Okay, here’s where we’re at. We’ve got a gigantic flotilla of combat ships over in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Iran, blockading Iranian ports to keep Iran from shipping oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump recently reinforced the flotilla with a third carrier group involving the USS Theodore Roosevelt, accompanied by an amphibious strike group including 2,000 Marines on the USS Malkin Island. The U.S. already had 50,000 troops in the region.

Back in Washington D.C., Trump somehow managed to find the time to get off his Qatari flying palace Air Force One to take a briefing in the White House from Chief Pentagon Poohbah Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper, who has been in charge of Trump’s disastrous war on Iran, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine. You can guess what they talked about: plans to attack Iran right after the midterm voting next week.

Missing from the briefing was Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, Director for Strategy, Plans and Policy, the Pentagon’s highest ranking war strategist and planner. Where was Brett? Well, 24 hours before the big war planning briefing at the White House, Hegseth fired him without cause. Just up and, you’re outta here, dude, as he has with about 20 other high-ranking generals and admirals since he took office last year.

The firing of General Sylvia was a head-scratcher until today, when news of the Iran war planning meeting leaked, along with extra news about General Sylvia – that Hegseth had fired him for leaking classified information to the press. But that’s not all. Late this afternoon, the White House leaked to two of its pet reporters at Axios that General Sylvia had admitted leaking secrets to the press.

Then it was revealed that the case against Sylvia has been referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and prosecution. Generals and other officers in the military who are suspected of committing a crime are normally investigated by the Civil Investigative Division and are subject to court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Hegseth obviously does not trust that a court martial of General Sylvia within the military system, where he would be tried by a jury of his peers, would find him guilty. Trump wants his lap poodle at the DOJ, Todd Blanche, to handle railroading General Sylvia.

Caught in the middle of this Hegseth clusterfuck was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Caine, whose office yesterday issued a statement thanking General Sylvia for his 32 years of service. “We wish him and his family the best as they graduate to new opportunities and the next chapters of their lives,” the statement from Caine’s office said. In his job as head of Pentagon planning, General Sylvia had reported directly to General Caine.

By early this morning, Caine’s office had formally retracted its statement of thanks to General Sylvia. His biography has been removed from the Pentagon website of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Sylvia was appointed to his Pentagon job by former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. General Sylvia, by the way, has made no such admissions of leaking classified information to reporters or anyone else.

As usual, the left hand in Hegseth’s Pentagon doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Four-star generals don’t usually thank someone for their service and then retract the statement and erase them from Pentagon records within 12 hours.

General Sylvia as a two-star held one of the Army’s most prestigious jobs: Commander of the 101^st Airborne Division. Other commanders of the 101^st have gone on to promotion to four stars and some of the top jobs in the Army, such as commander of Army forces in Europe or even commander of NATO or Chief of Staff of the Army. General Sylvia had been seen by Pentagon watchers as on that escalator to military success. He was what they called a “go getter” in the Army.

Until he wasn’t. I’ll give you two guesses what happened here. General Sylvia clearly wasn’t on board with another round of bombing Iran. We have no way of knowing what the plans are for this bombing campaign if it happens after the elections next week, but I’ll bet we’re going to see strikes on civilian targets and increased civilian casualties. General Sylvia may have registered his opposition to the plans that were presented by Hegseth to Trump at the White House today. Not only did he have to be fired, he had to be discredited. So, they threw the leaking charge at him and then leaked his alleged “confession” to Axios as a final stab in the back. The whole thing was so rushed, they were stepping on each other’s feet. When Trump was asked about the charges against General Sylvia today, he referred to him as a woman, saying “she’s going to have big problems.”

This is who started the war with Iran to begin with, the man who tanked the nation’s economy, sent prices skyrocketing, and wouldn’t be able to tell the Strait of Hormuz from the fairway on the 6^th hole at his Doral Golf Club. Neither he nor Hegseth are fit to shine General Brett Sylvia’s combat boots.

So next week, when we’re reading stories about Iran firing salvos of missiles and drones all over the Middle East in response to new U.S. bombing, knocking out oil wells, natural gas facilities, refineries and international airports, not to mention hitting U.S. military bases that are still in the region, you’ll know who did planning, and who is responsible for the disasters that follow. General Sylvia, fired and facing bogus Hegseth-generated charges, will not be among them.

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Just in time for Halloween, I’ve recounted my summer 2026 trip to Edinburgh, Scotland and the dark history of body snatching in the picturesque capital city for Undark Magazine. Body snatching is what it sounds like – in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, and the United States, a dark market for bodies and body parts emerged to support the burgeoning field of medicine and anatomical study. 

Today, body snatching is a thing from the past. But there are undercurrents that run through our organ donation and whole-body anatomical gift programs that demand we keep looking at this oft-macabre industry. One question continues to haunt us: who decides what happens to your body when you’re no longer here to speak for yourself? 

I try to answer that question and provide the full story behind body snatching, anatomical gift programs, and what health policy could do to protect the deceased in my piece. 

You can read more here.  

Forbes magazine has just published its annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, who this year hold a total of $8 trillion in wealth. It’s a gobsmacking amount of money, but we also live in a world where trillions are not unheard of. Here are a few thoughts and perspectives.

The promised Social Security benefits under current law exceed the projected inflows of revenue by about $29 trillion over the next 75 years, according to the actuaries. The promised Medicare benefits under current law exceed the projected inflows of revenue by about $60 trillion over the next 75 years. So if the US government somehow had an extra $8 trillion to play with, it could address either about one-quarter of the Social Security underfunding or about one-eighth of Medicare underfunding–but not both. My first point here is just that while US wealth held by the wealthiest is enormous, it is not an unlimited amount; indeed, the existing promises already made by just these two programs are much larger.

However, there’s no question that US wealth has been growing fast than the economy as a whole. This figure shows the ratio of wealth-to-GDP in the US since about 1960.

From the 1960s up through the 1980s, the ratio of total US wealth to the GDP was roughly 4–that is, with some fluctuations, total assets rose in proportion with the size of the economy. But in the the 1990s, this changed. There was a burst of stock market wealth in the 1990s and a burst of real estate wealth in the early 2000s, and in 2007 on the eve of the Great Recession, wealth was 4.9 times the size of GDP. After the Great Recession, the wealth-to-GDP ratio fell back to the historical level around 4. But a few years later, driven particularly by rising stock prices (which have risen almost six-fold since 2010), wealth-to-GDP took off again, topping out at a multiple of 5.5 in late 2021 and 2022, then sinking a bit, and now apparently pushing to a new high.

This pattern affects how one thinks about the rising inequality of wealth. If the wealth-to-GDP ratio remained the same over time, but the top 1% or 0.1% had a larger share, then the wealth gains at the top would come at the expense of wealth at the middle and the bottom. But with a rising wealth-to-GDP ratio, it’s possible for absolute quantity of wealth at the middle and the bottom to remain much the same, even as the quantity of wealth rises at the top. One might object that both scenarios are unpleasant, and I wouldn’t argue the point too vehemently, except to say that the two scenarios are unpleasant in different ways and with different implications.

The Federal Reserve now runs a website with detailed breakdowns of wealth data, updated quarterly. This figure shows the share of wealth held by different groups. this is household data, so with 134 million or so households in the US (and an average of 2.5 people per household), the top 1 percent consists of 1.34 million households. That top 1% held 8.6% of total wealth in 1989, and how holds about 15% of total wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution held 77.2% of total wealth in 1989, but now holds 68.3% of total wealth.

This figure shows the types of assets held by different groups: again, remember that the number of households represented by the first bars, the top 0.1%, is only one-ninth as large as the second bar, and both are much smaller than the bars that follow.

The next figure shows the same data, but instead of presenting it in dollars, it shows the share of assets held by each group. What’s interesting here, I think, is that those at the top of the wealth distributino are more likely to hold assets in the form of stocks and “unincorporated businesses.” hare of assets held by each group. Those further down the distibution hold a greater share of wealth in real estate.

There are a number of proposals out there for wealth taxes, but in my own mind, it seems significant that a number of European countries that tried wealth taxes then repealed them. One common problem is that exemptions and exceptions start getting built into the law: for wealth held by the family farm, for wealth in other family businesses, for historical properties, for family heirlooms, for works of art, and so on and so on. Another problem is how to value wealth that isn’t being bought and sold in the market, and yet another problem is what happens when wealth is held in other countries. I’ve discussed here some more practical alternatives to a wealth tax, like focusing on the rule that allows the value of assets to be “stepped up” at death, so that heirs do not pay tax on earlier capital gains (see here and here). Indeed, just rolling back the US estate tax rules to 2004–which was hardly a time of confiscatory taxation–could raise about $100 billion per year in revenue.

The post Snapshots of the US Wealth Distribution first appeared on Conversable Economist.