Nine Green Susannas

I played the word “epizoon” in Words With Friends last week. It was the first time I’ve done that, and probably the last. Before you get excited, it was only worth 44 points. That’s better than my average, but for a seven-letter word with a Z, it's pretty pathetic. The cool thing about this word is I had only just learned it the day before. An epizoon is an animal that lives off the body of another animal: a parasite. I’d just been reading an article about the death of the world’s oldest spider. Number 16 was a 43-year-old trapdoor spider living in the Australian outback. She was part of a study aimed at discovering the secrets of longevity. She was last seen alive in October 2016 when scientists checking on her discovered she’d been attacked by a parasitic wasp. Apparently, for trapdoor spiders at least, the secret to long life is to avoid wasps.