My garden has a guardian, an enormous black-and-yellow orb spider. I look for her every morning when I enter the enclosure we built last spring, to keep the deer out and create a protected spot for Calliope to bask in the sun and chase lizards.
She’s mostly blind, this spider. But she can sense me coming. I used to barge into the garden without thinking, swinging open the gate before I realized she’d used it as an anchor. She never fell or swung loose. By the time I spotted her or the remnants of her web, now in tatters, she’d usually retreated to a high spot on the fence.
They say spiders are capable of learning, planning, surprise. Do they also feel resentment?
Now I look to see where she’s built her web at night and try not to collide with it. Sometimes that’s difficult. At certain times of day, when the light slants at a particular angle, her webs vanish. It’s an optical trick refined over 400 million years of evolution: As spider silk has gotten stickier, stronger, and stretchier, it’s also gotten less reflective, making it harder for insects —or a bleary-eyed lady on her way to empty the compost bin — to detect.
She eats and digests her silk at night, then mends the web, or weaves a new one. She follows the most traditional of patterns: a spiraling wheel. Her style is ancient — scientists have found fossilized strands of orb-shaped webs preserved in slivers of Cretaceous amber. But it is also flexible, allowing her to adjust the strands based on where she’s caught prey before.
Webs help spiders sense and remember their surroundings, scientists say. Those more philosophically inclined call the spider web an extension of the arachnid mind. A delivery truck rumbles by, driving too fast for these country roads, and the web shudders violently in the vehicle’s tailwind. The orb spider holds on as the web whips around like a sailor clinging to a mast in a storm. What is she thinking?
I’d like to think we’re learning together, she and I. Maybe she’s getting better at predicting where I’m likely to walk and water, and I’m getting better at respecting her ornate nightly creations. We do seem to see less of each other lately — although I did almost run into her again yesterday, suspended on an invisible web at eye level, as if floating in midair, and I gasped.