In order to truly appreciate the remarkable story of the Spiders of Orizaba, one must first have a confident grounding in the geopolitical realities of the arachnid populations within the Sierra Madre Oriental's "Trans Volcanic Region" from the early 16th century to the present. By the 1500s, spider society was coming out of its "Dark Ages," an interminably long period of small warring states, factions and alliances, genocidal fads, betrayal, and pointless, resource-consuming intrigue. It's hard to say where that story began, because the history of spiders is inherently ephemeral: all history is transmitted either orally or via silk web, which, as all spiders learned the hard way, degrades rapidly without maintenance. The stories we tell today have been told for 500 years. Is that not enough of a mira...

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