History
Bigger Than Dinner Plates
The nightmare of the J’ba Fofi
In October of 2014, entymologist Piotr Naskrecki was taking a leisurely stroll through the rainforests of Guyana when he happened upon a creature that would have petrified the rest of us. That creature was a female Goliath Bird-Eating spider, a species whose stealth and cunning earn her dominion over the entire forest floor. Right away, Naskrecki knew he’d encountered a gem. The Goliath Bird-Eater is shy and rarely seen. Her inch-long fangs spell check-mate for the frogs, insects, and earthworms unlucky enough to meet her on her evening hunting rounds.
The term ‘goliath’ says it all. So how large is she? Birdie’s leg-span reaches a full twelve inches. She weighs seven ounces, has an abdomen the size of a large man’s fist, and will attack anything she comes across. She even sounds like terror embodied: Birdie’s feet have miniature claws that herald her presence with a very distinct ‘click-click-click’, not unlike the hooves of the world’s tiniest horse. While her bite is not fatal to humans, it is said that the sheer force of it is comparable to a nail being driven into one’s hand. The tiny creatures inhabiting the Guyanese rainforest are right to fear her.
But what if the world’s rainforests and woodlands harbor arachnids that, when fully-reared, reach the height of a man?
Rumor has it in the African Congo that a so-far-undiscovered species of spider dwells inside of self-made tunnels and dwarfs the Goliath bird-eater, making her look like an endearing Disney character in comparison. These spiders have been christened as j’ba fofi — meaning ‘very large spider’ — by the Congolese. The j’ba fofi have abdomens the size of basketballs, and their leg-span reaches up to five feet.
Impossible?
To disbelieve such reports is forgivable, even rational. In the first place, there really isn’t much history of people-sized arachnids in the fossil record. Second, there’s no hard evidence of the j’ba fofi’s existence apart from anecdotal records. And third: a spider’s unique respiratory system isn’t thought to be strong enough to sustain anything much larger than the bird-eating species.
But all the denial and skepticism in the world hasn’t stopped reports of encounters with the j’ba fofi from trickling in, even into the early 2000s. For arachnophobes everywhere (including yours truly), that’s a problem.
Spiders have an unassuming beauty. Their cerulean, green, and crimson hues form astounding geometric patterns under a sparkling sunshine. Perfectly formed in their own right, spiders weave gossamer silk into webs as elegant as any dutchess’s pearl necklace.
Are they death traps? Most certainly they are for the care-free insects which find themselves suddenly snared within them. Yet when dew-drops collect along a spider’s silky strands, the result is something like a gorgeous mandala encrusted wtih diamonds. And if Charlotte’s Web taught us anything, it’s that each spider is as unique as the home she spins. She is bold, daring, shy, gentle, and aggressive.
When the time comes to put together an egg-sac, she does so with patience and expertise. As soon as the spiderlings emerge, she will carry as many of them on her back as she can, or will stay put in her burrow while they scatter, like a proud mother seeing her children off to — bandcamp? College?
Either way, spiders are integral parts of our gardens and our lives. And in spite of all this, I am still afraid of them. I have no legitimate reason for that fear; I have never been bitten by one. But I have logged at least a few adrenaline-filled close calls with these eight-legged, alien-like little beings.
One incident stems from early adulthood. I’d gone to visit a local Walgreen’s pharmacy, and I was casually pushing a shopping basket through the store when something on the ground caught my eye.
It was unmistakably a spider: huge, black, covered in fur, and with gangly, crooked legs that gave it an oddly misshapen appearance. It couldn’t have been a tarantula, because I know what they look like, and they generally aren’t very fast moving unless they need to be. What kind of spider it was exactly I’ll never know, but it moved so jarringly that I almost didn’t believe my eyes. It wasn’t hopping or scuttling. For all intents and purposes it was galloping; all that was missing were the hoofbeats. With nausea blooming, I left that cart stark in the middle of the pharmacy without purchasing a single thing and drove the h**l out of that parking lot.
J’ba fofi encounters have been reported from around the world. They’ve been spotted in Uganda, Venezuela, Vietnam, the Amazon, England, Canada, and the United States (yay!).
History’s initial j’ba fofi reports, though, seem to originate in the Congolese jungle. The sticky webs these spiders create fan out from tree to tree. Tribesmen declare these webs to be roughly three feet across and six feet in length. The arachnids themselves are apparently so dangerous that the Congolese alter their homes painstakingly to keep these spiders away from their living spaces and their children.
To accomplish this, the walls of thatched huts are tightly-spaced and the flooring steeply pitched to the ground. When webs are encountered, hunters give them as wide a berth as possible. The j’ba fofi have large fangs with ‘potent’ venom. Even their eggs are huge, said to be yellowish in color and the size and shape of peanut shells.
In Uganda in 1890, English missionary Arthur Sims was on his way to a village on the shore of Lake Nyasa. He and two of his porters stumbled across a sticky spider-web that was nearly impossible to get out of. While attempting to use a knife to free his men, two huge j’ba fofi suddenly sprang at them from their hiding places. The horrified Sims had to resort to his gun to chase them off. It worked, but Sims’ men had both been bitten. In short order, the porters became swollen and feverish. Neither of them survived.
In what’s perhaps the most famous j’ba fofi encounter, a Reginald Lloyd and his wife were driving down a road in the African jungle. Promptly, a creature that appeared to be a small monkey or jungle cat scuttled across their path. Lloyd hit the brakes and peered through the windshield. When he saw that the ‘monkey’ was actually a huge spider, Lloyd drove out of the area in terror and vowed never to return. This occurred in 1938.
Encounters with the j’ba fofi seemed to bloom from there. A man known only as ‘Craig’ claims that, during World War 2, his grandfather came across a gargantuan spider in Papua New Guinea. It was sitting in an emerald-hued web that was at least a yard long. Overcome with fear, Craig’s grandfather killed the spider with a machete. Still more reports flooded from embattled Vietnam during war time: a five-man team of US soldiers were stalking the jungle when they came upon several spiders between 30 and 40 inches long. One soldier reports that they opened fire upon these spiders with M16s, but some continued to move after being maimed by bullets. It was claimed that these enormous spiders were attracted to water sources. Thus, they were encountered many many times, and not just by American GIs. Vietnamese soldiers had to fight with these powerful spiders also.
In 2001, Sheila was a librarian in the UK. While driving along Nottingham’s stone bridge one evening, Sheila’s headlights illuminated what she first thought was a hedgehog trying to cross the road. She slowed to take a better look and realized that the creature was no hedgehog. Sheila saw very clearly that it was a spider with legs that were two feet long. It scrambled across her path and vanished through a gate at the side of the road.
Going back to 1981, a Kentucky farmer by the name of Robert A. was mowing grass for his grandfather. During that time, Robert and his family lived in an area that consisted mostly of woodland. Robert paused the mower to take a break, leaning against the trunk of a tree for shade. Eventually he could hear some rustling in the leaves above him. Expecting to see a squirrel, Robert craned his neck and looked. It was no squirrel. What he saw instead was a spider ‘the size of a hubcap’. It frightened him so badly that he ran home to retrieve a rifle. Upon returning to the tree, Robert found that the creature had vanished. He never allowed his children to play in the backyard anymore after that.
Back to the all-important question: do five-foot-long monster spiders really exist out there somewhere, or is it all make-believe and misidentification?
Common arguments against the j’ba fofi center around the spider’s delicate respiratory systems. These consist of book-lungs, so named because they look like the pages of a book. Tarantulas have two sets of these, but some spiders have what are called tracheal tubes. These are positioned in the spider’s posterior end, comprised of long tubes with small holes along the belly that allow air to be absorbed through the skin. As far as scientists are able to understand, these two types of breathing systems couldn’t sustain a spider much larger than a bird-eater.
Entymology is very firm on this stance, but there was once a time when we didn’t think that spiders could feel pain, either.
An article by Ester Inglis-Arkell explains that researchers have performed a series of tests on spider subjects, in which they inject the legs with various types of venom. The experiment showed that after the injections, the spiders would jettison the affected legs. The types of venom belonged to both bees and wasps. The spiders were also injected with several venom components, like serotonin, histamine, phospholipase, A2, and melittin. In all cases, the legs were shed, presumably to keep the venom from travelling to the spiders’ circulatory systems. This suggests that the arachnids feel some degree of discomfort when they’ve been exposed to the venom — which would mean that a spider’s pain could mimic that felt by mammals and humans. If our understanding of the arachnid’s ability to register pain has begun to shift, who’s to say that their respiratory systems have evolved in ways we haven’t even come close to understanding?
Entymologist Piotr eventually collected the puppy-sized Goliath treasure and brought her back home for further study. Some time after that, he thought to put her on display in his museum, so the beautiful creature was ‘humanely euthanized’.
Sources: Wikipedia, Astonishing Legends, Strange Realms, Dark League Paranormal, Cryptozoology A To Z, Mysterious Universe
