Arachnoneurology
Arachnoneurology
[Beret Guy holding a protractor and handling a fork-like stand with black knobbly protrusions. On the table is some sticks, a set square and a ruler. There is also a large book titled: Spider Psychology [Beret Guy places his creation in a cobwebbed corner.] [Spiders weave webs around Beret Guy's creation. One of them hangs down above it from the ceiling.] [Beret Guy pulls a shirt made of spider silk away from his creation. At the top of the panel is a frame that breaks the main panels frame. Inside this it says:] Six weeks later:

Beret Guy uses spider psychology (that he has obviously learned from the heavy volume of a book lying on the table with that title) to engineer a forked object in such a way that spiders will weave a silk shirt around it. After six weeks he can take the finished shirt off the "rack", and after optionally removing some stray spiders it should be ready for use.
Usually extracting spider silk is a complicated process and getting enough to weave a shirt would take very long and be very expensive. But making such an impossible project work is a typical behavioral pattern for Beret Guy, who continues to do amazing things with animals and other things from nature.
The prefix arachno- means "(related to) spiders". Arachnology , for example, is the scientific study of spiders. Neurology is a branch of medicine dealing with disorders of the nervous system , which includes the brain . So the title of the comic can be translated into the scientific study of spider brains .
The title text mentions the book lying on the table, giving not only the title and the edition (21st) but also summing up some more (non-existent and increasingly far-fetched) fields of science related to spiders, which may as well exist if spider psychology has such a big standard work. Apart from adding the word forensic in one case, all five fields come from combining only the same two words "arachno" and "neuro" (sometimes one of them more than once) and ending any combination with "-ology". Especially funny is the neuro-arachnoneurology, which is explained to be the field where it is the brains of the scientist who study spiders brains, that are examined. The last one seems to be related to arachnophobia , the fear of spiders, as arachnoarachnology is spiders with spiders on top - i.e. too many spiders .
Arachnophobia seems to be a problem for Randall himself, according to the What if? Spiders vs. the Sun . In this he links to an article about a factory that was covered in plenty enough spider web silk to make shirts to a whole regiment of soldiers.
This is the first comic with special mentioning of a science related directly to spiders. The next was 1747: Spider Paleontology .
[Beret Guy holding a protractor and handling a fork-like stand with black knobbly protrusions. On the table is some sticks, a set square and a ruler. There is also a large book titled: Spider Psychology [Beret Guy places his creation in a cobwebbed corner.] [Spiders weave webs around Beret Guy's creation. One of them hangs down above it from the ceiling.] [Beret Guy pulls a shirt made of spider silk away from his creation. At the top of the panel is a frame that breaks the main panels frame. Inside this it says:] Six weeks later:
