Frostbite

Rear Sights

"So spiders are ectotherms, right? They need to get their body heat from external sources or else they run the risk of dying when water freezes in their cells, and the resulting ice crystals can damage things like the cell membrane and other structures. But did you know that some spiders have adapted different ways of actually surviving the cold?"

Peter turned his sticker-covered laptop around, granting Ned a full view of the screen and the various spiders that popped up on the google images search for 'arctic spiders.'

"So there's two strategies where they can do this: freeze-tolerance and freeze-avoidance. Different species can use both, switch between them, can only use one or the other—point is, any combination is possible. Freeze-tolerance is where ice crystals can form outside the cell and lower the freezing point of cellular fluids. This happens in invertebrates, mostly, especially in a lot of marine species and bugs and some of them can survive as low as -70°C! Um, which is like... somewhere around -90°F? About?"

Ned nodded, laser-focused on the pictures in front of him. "Uhuh."

"But in freeze-avoidance," Peter continued as he waved excitedly towards the screen, "which happens way more in vertebrates and spiders, is where water can be supercooled to -40°C, also weirdly -40°F, without forming any ice at all! And some arctic insects can even have 25% of their body weight be made up of anti-freeze compounds that have quick switching between active and inactive states, reduces water loss, and can be helped by freeze-tolerance. But the supercooling to -40°F is pretty much theory with a few rare exceptions as far as I could find, and the range for the most tolerable temperatures the body can handle is about from freezing to -4°F. And that makes a lot of sense because if intracellular freezing actually happens, it just plain results in the death of the organism."

"Right."

"Right. So." Peter leaned over the laptop to type 'wolf spiders' into the search bar and pressed enter. "The Pardosa species are wolf spiders that jump on their prey, and there was this study on the Pardosa groenlandica—found in places like North America, Russia, Greenland—where they tested how cold-hardy they were. Their supercooling point was about 14°F and they could still move just a little below freezing which is amazing considering they can't, you know, thermoregulate."

His friend nodded emphatically. "Spiders are awesome."

"Spoken like a true genius. But! Keeping all this in mind—you remember how we were so sure that the spider that gave me my powers was some sort of jumping spider, probably from the Salticidae jumping spiders family because of the proportionate strength thing and the general sticking-to-walls-because-setules thing?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, I actually want to tweak our hypothesis. A bit." Peter started to pace the room as Ned eagerly watched from his spot at the desk. "I think Oscorp found a way to cross-breed a Salticidae spider and a Pardosa spider, or at least cross-engineered some genes, then ran a bunch of weird experiments and induced way too many mutations on the offspring, and one of the probably few offspring that survived those trials was the one that bit me."

Ned crossed his arms. "You lost me." A finger pointed to the laptop screen. "While the cold-surviving stuff was cool, what kind of basis do you have to make you think it could be part of the spider that got to you? I mean, it's not like any of that applies to you, right?" When his best friend said nothing, he gasped. "Oh. My. God. Do you have new powers? Does Spidey have new powers?!"

"Uh... I don't think it's Spidey that has the new powers. It's—I was trying to figure out the spider thing because I don't think the mutation could've survived in my body if the spider wasn't able to survive super cold temperatures."