Just an Old Chestnut?

Are spiders afraid of conkers? The practice of placing conkers around the house to deter spiders is an old one, but is it just an old wives' tale? That highly prestigious learned society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, is offering the public a prize of £300 for the best evidence one way or the other.

The girls of Redland High School's Nature Club have taken up the challenge and devised their own experiment to test the hypothesis. With help from their teacher Mr Mark Ehrlich they obtained a circular ‘choice chamber' and placed a pinecone, a beechnut and a conker in three of its four compartments, leaving the fourth one empty. Conducting a search of the School gardens they found seven different species of spider and placed them in the top of the chamber. Then they watched to see what would happen……. …

The spiders ran around on top of all the compartments, apparently taking no notice of the contents.

Can we say that this experiment is proof positive that arachnids have no conker-phobia? "Probably not,” admits Mr Ehrlich, "but the girls had a terrific time devising and carrying out the experiment. It's so important to find ways of making scientific enquiry fun and instructive at the same time.”

Redland High already has a close conker connection: the School features in the 2010 Guinness Book of Records as holding the official world record for the most simultaneous conkers matches ever played. The record was achieved on 13 October 2006 when 394 pupils played 197 matches! The record breaking conkers were naturally home grown from the chestnut tree in the School gardens. It is not known if spiders observed the contest from a safe distance, but the world record is certainly on the Web!