Arachnorama

By Patricia Canright Smith

/ Fiction /    

     If you wish to live and thrive, 

     Let a spider run alive.      

LET’S BE FRIENDS

There’s more to a spider than the number of legs. We would like you humans to know us. We would like to share what we know about you humans. Knowledge leads to understanding; understanding leads to respect. It’s time.

Most humans approach spiders with fear and loathing. A furry little creature with four legs: Oooo. A furry little creature with eight legs: Ewwww. Tom Thumb done in by a cruel bite, Miss Muffet jolted off her tuffet—really? Might not the father, Dr. Muffet, bear some responsibility? All well and good to believe in the medicinal benefits of spiders, but he forced the little girl to eat them alive. Of course she jolted.

All right. Let’s get this over with. Spider venom. Delivered by spider bite. An unhappy subject. Yes, some spider bites produce irreversible necrosis in humans. Yes, there’s been the occasional death, mostly in children. But spiders need fangs and venom to procure food. We need fangs and venom for self-defense. In the scheme of things, spiders are tiny, soft, vulnerable. We bite as a last resort! 

It’s not personal. What would be the point? We can’t eat you. 

Navajo humans say that Spider Woman was the Creator. Her silk connects everything to everything.

Hello.

THREE MILLION TO ONE

Lions and tigers and bears—oh no. Spiders are the planet’s dominant terrestrial predator: 51, 673 “known” species, 6000 jumping spiders alone. There’s roughly three million spiders to one human on the planet—with zero environmental degradation. 

A British arachnologist once calculated that a single acre of grassy meadow houses 2,265,000 spiders. Because that is what they do, British arachnologists.

Humans count things.

WITHIN TEN FEET

Spider in the corner

Money in the hand.

Spiders live everywhere. Ev-ery-where. Tundra, jungle, sand dune. Near the summit of Mt. Everest. 

Humans live everywhere too. Sometimes they fight about it. (Just an impression. Feel free to correct any misunderstandings.)

Cave, woodland, millpond, seep. By the way, a ‘water spider’ is not a spider, it’s an insect related to aphids and cicadas. (Insect: six legs, antennae, three-segmented body. Spider: eight legs, no antennae, two-segmented body.) That insect’s proper name is water strider, though we’ve also come across water skeeter, water scooter, pond skater, water skipper, water glider, water skimmer or puddle fly. Just make one up! 

The Diving Bell Spider, who lives under water, carries around her own personal bubble and surfaces once a night to replenish. She’s really pretty.

NOTE: When referring to a spider, we default to “she.” In the kingdom of spiders, the dominant sex is female. In the human world, we understand that the dominant sex is male, though the pronoun “he” as standard usage seems to be losing its appeal. 

In the end, spiders can always improvise a domicile. (Humans can improvise too, but some sure act miffed about it.) Plane and train, Mercedes, jeep. Tractor, combine, outhouse, heap. Your bathtub, your bed. 

Unless you live under the ocean or in Antarctica, there is right now a spider within ten feet of you.

VOLKSWAGON BEETLE

Four hundred million years ago, spiders were sea creatures the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Ten-foot legs striding the surf! Once we left the sea, we shrank, and giant spiders are no more, except in movies like Eight Legged Freaks. 

Today the largest spider is the Goliath Birdeater, a tarantula with an 11-inch leg-span (think three hamsters across). The tiniest is the Patu Marplesi, a Samoan number whose leg-span is .018 inch (think dust mite, book louse, thrip). You’d never see that one coming. 

Humans—who did not exist four hundred million years ago—have, over their 300,000 years, straightened up and lost their hair. Brilliant.

Kidding. Humans are brilliant because they developed massive brains. 

A spider is a repellent against plague when worn around the neck in a walnut shell. 

EVEN BIRDS

Spiders are strictly carnivores: flies, fleas, mosquitoes—too many pests to mention. Let’s just say, without spiders you’d all be up to your butts in flies. Maybe take a moment to appreciate your house spider. 

The largest tropical spiders also eat vertebrates: frogs, toads, fish, lizards, small rodents. Snakes and birds. No, it’s not cruel; it’s the way of the world. Don’t forget, spiders kill only for sustenance and self-defense. Never for sport; not for power, or out of raging hate. 

Spiders are cunning: we stalk, pounce, steal, and snare. Fish and lasso. 

Once a spider’s got something in her grasp, she sinks in her fangs to inject venom. Her venom may not kill, but it will paralyze, which protects the spider from becoming dinner herself. Maybe the spider’s not that hungry? She’ll wrap the catch for later. Five little cocoons on a web is not accumulated wealth, it’s thrift. We do not waste.

Every spider comes equipped with a sucking stomach. Since spiders can’t chew, and spiders’ victuals don’t come in liquid form, we crack our catch with our mandibles, pierce it with our fangs, and pour in mighty digestive enzymes through our palps, straw-like tubes on either side of the mandibles. Ten minutes, and it’s soup. The way some spiders work, like the tidy little crab spiders, nothing but a perfect, hollow exoskeleton—wings, body, legs—remains. 

Humans can chew. And omnivorous humans eat just about anything. Sometimes there’s excess. Sometimes there’s waste. Sometimes a disaster, sometimes a masterpiece. 

We believe there are cooking shows on TV?

PINK TOES

Spinne, Spindel, Spinnekop, Edderkopp. 

Ankaboot, Zhi-zhu, Oodoodo.

Mang moom.

In any language, a spider is something to behold. We are not making this up: chalk white with delicate orange dots, iridescent blue with black spikes, sequined peacock rainbow, pure fiery red. How about a purple pink-toed tarantula!     

We are not able to evaluate humans’ appearance. Humans are scary; we are in hiding. But we’ve gotten the idea that no one—human—is satisfied, and everyone—female—is insecure, and this seems to have created something called a “gold mine.” 

BIRD DROPPINGS   

Certain spiders are camouflage masters: mottled spider on tree bark, dappled spider on shrubs, electric green spider on a tender new shoot. One crab spider changes color every time she lands on a fresh flower. 

Shape-shifting spiders can fold or crumple or stretch to look like leaves, buds, twigs, even bird droppings. There’s mimics, too—wasp-mimics, but also ants. The ant-mimicking spider raises two front legs and waves them around like antennae while she marches, ant-like, on the other six legs. Most birds won’t eat ants, you see. The ant-mimicking spiders do, though. Eat ants. 

When another human mimics you, it’s probably nothing to do with procuring food. It might even hurt your feelings. Yet when a non-human mammal mimics a human, it seems to produce happiness in the human. Often, it’s rewarded. 

Hindus throw spiders at a wedding like confetti. To bring happiness.

LITTLE TINY HAIRS

Most spiders have eight eyes, but poor eyesight, though the hunting spiders, like the lynx and wolf spiders, do have excellent vision, with two of their eyes mounted on their heads like shiny black headlights.

But we have other amazing senses. Like hair! Every single spider is covered in hair, a supersensitive receptor that can pick up even the tiniest perturbation on the web or in the wind. 

     Humans have hair, too, but it won’t tell them what’s happening.

Spider hair can be so fine as to be invisible to the human eye (black widow) or so thick it’s like a pelt (tarantula). The African mygalomorph looks like a spider-orangutan. 

By the way, these big hairy spiders, with six eyes and downward-facing fangs, are primitive cousins: spider cavemen, so to speak. 

Human cavemen are, alas, gone. We miss human cavemen. They were amiable, and they provided housing. They did eat spiders, but not so many.    

Eight little eyes, little tiny hairs, but our best sense organ is feet. The terminus of a spider leg is tuned to touch, taste, and smell. And bonus: with minuscule hooks, spider feet can climb anything, even across the ceiling, though sometimes the spider has overreached and will fall on you. Like when you’re sleeping.

The Russians say if a spider drops on your head you will receive a present.

GENIUS     

Spiders do not think. We cannot. No feelings, either. A spider brain is a concentration of nerve cells in the cephalothorax which processes input from eyes, hairs, and feet, and initiates a dash, clasp, bite. 

No emotion, no reason. No tactics, strategies, policies. No blame.

And no physicists, prophets, philosophers, or professors either. The spiders’ genius is silk.     

Dispatched from spinnerets at the rear of the abdomen, spiders’ silk is more durable than Kevlar, stronger than steel, sticky, stretchable and waterproof. (A comparison with human extrusions would be less than kind.) The orb webs of large, rainforest Aeneids can snare a bat in flight, and it’s been said that if you scaled up, a spider’s web could snare an airplane. 

Humans would love to produce spider silk commercially, but, you know, spiders aren’t cows. Spiders eat each other.

Not psychopaths! A few cells, basic instinct—spiders have no psychology. What we have are architects, engineers, innovators and builders. Orb webs, cobwebs, funnel webs, triangle webs, tangle webs, mesh webs, sheet webs, dome webs. So many webs. Some spiders eat the web every morning and build a new one. Others repair, repair, repair. 

Many use the web for catching dinner. Spider silk is also used to swaddle, shelter, bind, parachute, decorate, wrap, confuse and communicate. Webs offer nutrition, hydration, and control.

Early observers believed that spiders could fly. Early observers were wrong. No spider has wings in any phase of development. A spider travels using—you guessed it—silk! Affixed to a twig, she casts herself into the heavens, spooling out silk as she goes. It’s called ballooning. The flight may take her to the nearest branchlet, or it may take her 10, 000 feet into the air or two-hundred miles out to sea. 

Drifting really works for spiders. 

Humans also drift—off to sleep, down a lazy river. But to get airborne, humans had to cook up fancy gizmos. 

The silk spun in one day could circle the earth. Nine days, it’s to the moon. Some birds, especially hummingbirds, steal spider silk for their nests. You might think, Well, at least the spider was spared, but that’s not how a spider sees it. It costs her a lot to have some bird fly off with all that protein.

Ever since Baby Spider spun a web across the opening of the cave sheltering Baby Jesus, people have believed that it’s unlucky to kill a spider. 

When Pest Control talks about “controlling” your spider population, they mean exterminate: kill every one. Forget unlucky; that’s just monstrous.

BRISTLY BODY PARTS

Listen to this: Spiders are not mute. 

The Barking Spider, an ambush predator of the Australian outback, can rub bristly body parts together to make a “barking” sound. It’s called stridulation. It’s a warning. A wolf spider can also stridulate, a soft purring sound. Courtship. But mostly we communicate through web vibrations, chemical signals, and tactile cues.

Humans often miss silent communications. They underutilize bristly body parts. But humans can speak. They can shout. Screech, stomp, sob, clap. It’s a lot. 

And their machines—cacophony.

And yet, a human being can sing.

PALPS FOR PENISES     

Plink plink plink. Plink plink plink. 

One toe on the silk, the rest poised for getaway. He’s plucking love letters on her web the way a Medieval poet plucked love on a lute. Plink plink. 

The little male spider steps up. So brave. Plink Plink! With luck, the female spider will recognize that the oncoming object is neither predator nor prey.

But wait—can we call it bravery if he has no choice? Courtship rituals are inscribed in the genes: spiders must mate, males must take the risk, and males must do the work. So they drum, they dance, they thrust two front legs skyward in stiff salute. Who could resist a giant mygalomorph coming at you like that? 

Let’s say the female spider gets the drift and doesn’t attack. Once she’s accepted his proposal, she seems to go into a trance, and he can scuttle into position. Male spiders don’t have penises because they don’t need penises. They use their palps to deliver sperm. Sometimes they re-load and re-insert. Some use two full palps. 

Once copulation is complete, the male dives off and makes a run for it. Spider sex is risky business. The widow spiders eat their mates after mating. Some even eat him during the act.

Human sex? Human instinct seems to have lost lucidity when it comes to sex.

Normally no one dies, but still, it can be fraught.      

A spider in the afternoon is a sign of a gift

But a spider in the evening will all hopes uplift.

MOTHER

The spider taketh hold with her hands

And is kings’ palaces.

Have you ever had the pleasure of grasping a handrail and unleashing an explosion of tiny black-and-yellow specks trailing shimmering silks? Spiderlings.

Like humans, spiders start out as fertilized eggs. Some eggs are wrapped in an egg-sac and secured to a leaf, or under a mailbox, somewhere the mother can stand guard. Some spiders swaddle every individual egg, hundreds of pinpoints in individual silk blankets. A few carry the egg-sacs around in their jaws, or attached to their abdomens, as if it were no trouble at all. These mother-spiders keep the egg-sac dry, air the egg-sac out, even sunbathe the egg-sac. A few spider-mothers gorge during gestation and then die, to give the spiderlings their first meal. One spider-mother even lets the babies eat her alive, starting with the blood in her legs.

A human mother often feels like she’s being eaten alive by her kids, but it’s a metaphor. Human infants suckle; they do not eat their mothers. 

Spiders do not have metaphor. We also do not have choice. Those egg-tending spider-mothers? Scientists call them “faithful” and “devoted.” Scientists! Come on; it’s instinct. If you take the egg-sac from a female wolf spider, she will adopt some other round thing, like a rabbit dropping, and carry that around. 

Of course, only a curious human would take the egg-sac without eating the spider.

CHILD

Unlike insects, spiders are born as spiders, not worms, so there’s no larval stage and no metamorphosis. Spider DNA is arachnid—scorpions, havestmen, ticks, vinegaroons. Spiders’ relation to ticks is none of our doing, and it is wrong to defame us on that account. 

Did you, human, choose your family? Every cousin?

All spiders are also born with a protective carapace, an exoskeleton that cannot expand. So how do we grow? We moult, manufacturing a new carapace and jettisoning the old. In fact, a spider’s first moult happens in the egg-sac.

The bigger the spider, the more she must moult.

Which means more danger! 

Most spiders discard outgrown carapaces while hanging nearly naked by a thread—vulnerable to wasps, toads; lizards, bats, and birds. 

Tarantulas lie on their backs in the duff and kick their way out. So perilous: snakes, giant centipedes. Ever come across an empty pelt with six cellophane eyes? Let’s hope she made it.

We get the idea that human growth carries peril as well, though not necessarily from predators. The trouble seems to peak in late childhood, called puberty, when “normal development” becomes a mess to untangle—like a blown web, and you can’t just eat it and start over. 

Nyame, god-of-all-things, rewarded the sons of Anansi the Spider with a glowing globe. 

After the sons’ endless squabbles about who should keep it, exhausted Anansi returned globe to Nyame, who placed it in the sky, where it could belong to everyone.

You’re welcome.

INTROVERT

Native American cultures say Spider presages change of an auspicious nature.

Most spiders live alone. In human vernacular, they’re “anti-social.” Since a spider will attack and eat whatever small protein happens her way, most spiders simply cannot overlap except to mate—which can also end up, well, you know. 

But spiders do not experience loneliness; no yearning for touch, none of that. 

Lately, some spiders have developed ways to recognize one another—a particular gait (vibration) or smell (pheromone). These spiders can live together, spinning large communal webs and sharing hearth and harvest. In India, Eresid spiders construct fluffy, three-dimensional sheet-and-funnel webs across kilometers of vegetation. Pretty cool, if you like that sort of thing. 

Social spiders maintain a communal nursery and have males and females—spiders of dangerously different dimensions—cohabiting. We suppose every now and then there is an incident. One communal species features a class system: smaller, weaker spiders live on the outer fringes, where there’s more risk of predation and less to eat.    

Just like a human class system! Instinct abides.

Until recently, it was thought that all social spiders were web-weavers, but crab spiders, lynx spiders and huntsman spiders have also been observed living communally. Maybe the loners are on their way out. And humans? The marriage rate has tumbled. Likewise extended families, churches, communes. Maybe human loners are on their way in.

ARACHNE

The Greeks weaved our favorite story, about a cheeky young woman named Arachne. 

Smitten with her own singular skills, Arachne decided to challenge Athena, goddess of war, handicraft, and practical reason, to a weaving contest. (The young take risks.)

Irritated by the presumption, Athena nevertheless accepted. 

Athena’s perfect, exquisite tapestry depicted gods in their majesty. 

Arachne’s perfect, exquisite tapestry depicted naughty gods’ amorous adventures. 

Enraged by the subject matter—and perfection—of the cheeky challenger’s work, Athena shredded Arachne’s tapestry. 

Disconsolate Arachne hanged herself, but the merciful goddess loosened the rope. The rope became a cobweb and Arachne became a spider.

Lucky girl. 

But would a human master-weaver want to become a spider master-weaver? We are the best, but we don’t last. 

Not that we worry about such things. We don’t live in Time. And we don’t know death. We eat, we mate, we spin and bear young—we live. And yes, we die. And we don’t know. 

Didn’t a human say that if you don’t know death, you can’t know life? 

Spiders live without knowing. Humans know without living. Let’s be friends.

There’s so much to learn.