Happy spider mating season! I keep finding baby spiders in my shoes, and every morning there are new cobwebs in my car’s steering wheel. Maybe you’re seeing more spiders, too? Our own LWONian Betsy Mason wrote about the noble art of counting spiders for Knowable Magazine last year. And this little post first ran in September 2023.
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 make a 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.
We know 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. 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 ancient pattern: a spiraling wheel. Scientists have found fossilized strands of orb-shaped webs preserved in slivers of Cretaceous amber. 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. Some even call the spider web an extension of the arachnid mind. A delivery truck rumbles by, too fast for the narrow country road, and the web shudders in its tailwind. The spider holds on as the web whips around, like a sailor swinging from the mast in a storm. What is she thinking?
I’d like to think we’re learning together: Maybe she’s getting better at predicting where I’m likely to walk and water each moring, while I am getting better at avoiding her nightly creations. We do seem to see less of each other lately — although I did almost run into her yesterday, suspended on an invisible web at eye level as if floating in midair.
