On our quest for the Sword of Light, we met a Spider Queen. We were really scared of her at first. But when her cave started filling up with water, she saved us by spinning a web ladder so we could escape.

Spiders can be very helpful! They eat pesky insects like mosquitoes. And in one survival story, spiders also helped two men live through a terrible ordeal in the jungle.

In 2007, Loic Pillois and Guilhem Nayral, from France, got lost in the steamy jungles of French Guiana, which borders Brazil and Suriname. The men had only enough food to last twelve days. They managed to build a shelter and waited to be rescued.

When their food ran out, they began eating insects, turtles, frogs, and—you guessed it—large bird-eating spiders. As they waited, the men were eaten up with insect bites and parasites. They also faced constant danger from jaguars, snakes, and poison dart frogs.

Trees more than one hundred feet tall blocked their view of the sky. The forest was so thick that no one in a helicopter or plane could find them. In fact, rescuers had given up ever finding them alive.

After three weeks, Loic and Guilhem were desperate. They began walking through marshes and deep jungle underbrush. The men were sick, and rain beat down on them as they trudged through the jungle.

Finally Guilhem got so weak he couldn’t keep walking, but Loic managed to reach the village of Saül. A search party quickly set out to rescue his friend.

Four hours later, they came across Guilhem. Doctors said he would have died in a matter of hours if they hadn’t found him. Both men had survived for seven long weeks!

Guilhem Nayral is brought to a hospital after his rescue.

Now that you know how to survive tigers, cobras, blue-ringed octopuses, twisters, a T. rex, pirates, and all kinds of other things, it’s time to have a little fun. Maybe you should go outside and build a tree house.