Spiders don't have leg muscles like crabs do! They use hydraulics and stuff instead, which is really cool. So a spider leg is basically a hollow tube with some pulleys and a lot of hemolymph in it.
(Okay, looking into research on larger spiders specifically I guess they do have a limited about of muscles but not really the way you'd think of a vertebrate or even a crab or lobster, it's mostly hydraulic.)
However the hydraulic method in an arthropod has serious weight limitations, giant tarantulas are already more or less at the physical limit, so giant spiders couldn't use that method anyway, if we're worrying about biological logic. Giant spiders without lots of handwavium probably would have to end up working more like crabs (and might even actually be some other kind of spiderlike arthropod rather than technically arachnids) (although all arthropods have size limits due to basic biomechanical physics so you'll be using some handwavium anyway.)
Anyway, I'd say giant spider legs are either basically king crab legs or they're full of delicious nutritious hemolymph that you can either suck up liquid with a straw or coagulate into jelly, with a few small muscles you can scrape out of the interior.
I found some accounts of eating tarantulas in Cambodia, and for the rest of the body, it sounds like the head/thorax area is pretty much like crab or lobster meat, and the abdomen is full of squishy, fairly bland viscera and possibly eggs, and often not eaten. So I'd imagine the cephalothorax would be butchered for meat, and the abdomen you'd check for caviar and then either feed the rest to the dogs or, if you were close to home, drag the whole abdomen back and use it the way you'd use a mammal's organ meats.
If you google image search "Tarantula dissection" you will probably get some OK art reference? There's a bunch of tarantula dissections on youtube too it looks like.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-09-11 07:11 pm (UTC)(Okay, looking into research on larger spiders specifically I guess they do have a limited about of muscles but not really the way you'd think of a vertebrate or even a crab or lobster, it's mostly hydraulic.)
However the hydraulic method in an arthropod has serious weight limitations, giant tarantulas are already more or less at the physical limit, so giant spiders couldn't use that method anyway, if we're worrying about biological logic. Giant spiders without lots of handwavium probably would have to end up working more like crabs (and might even actually be some other kind of spiderlike arthropod rather than technically arachnids) (although all arthropods have size limits due to basic biomechanical physics so you'll be using some handwavium anyway.)
Anyway, I'd say giant spider legs are either basically king crab legs or they're full of delicious nutritious hemolymph that you can either suck up liquid with a straw or coagulate into jelly, with a few small muscles you can scrape out of the interior.
I found some accounts of eating tarantulas in Cambodia, and for the rest of the body, it sounds like the head/thorax area is pretty much like crab or lobster meat, and the abdomen is full of squishy, fairly bland viscera and possibly eggs, and often not eaten. So I'd imagine the cephalothorax would be butchered for meat, and the abdomen you'd check for caviar and then either feed the rest to the dogs or, if you were close to home, drag the whole abdomen back and use it the way you'd use a mammal's organ meats.
If you google image search "Tarantula dissection" you will probably get some OK art reference? There's a bunch of tarantula dissections on youtube too it looks like.