I need to revisit my last post about the spider. I watched an orb weaver last night build her web in the corner of one of my lakefront windows. She started at 8pm, when the sun had just slipped below the trees. She worked must faster than I could have imagined. She first set her longitudinal threads, dropping down from the top sill, on a diagonal, and swinging herself to the vertical sill. That first thread was a loose loop. She quickly climbed to the corner and dropped herself down to swing and catch that loose thread. After a few more structural threads, she was off to the races, weaving the most intricate spiral web. The spirals are sticky, the structural threads are not.
She was done in about an hour. She then settled in the middle of the web. But not for long. Once the sun goes down, the mosquitoes arrive in droves, looking for any way into the cottage to cause me misery. When one got stuck, the spider quickly crawled down to wrap her prisoner in several ribbons of thread. She did not eat the mosquito but crawled back to center. I soon realized why as more mosquitoes landed all over her web. She needed to immobilize them before their twists and wriggles to escape tore up her web.
Perhaps she had a very good night because I was shining my flashlight on her web drawing light-loving bloodsuckers to my window. By the time I went to bed, she had more than a dozen neatly wrapped food parcels. Her web was not in shreds, but there were some holes where some larger insects had bombed through.
In the middle of the night, I took another look. Her parcels were fairly neatly consumed and she had retreated to the corner of the window. She has been sleeping there all day. Her web was gone by the morning as the daytime breezes probably swept it away. I’m waiting to see if she is back at it again tonight.
It occurs to me that what distinguishes us from wildlife is that we don’t have to work quite as hard for our food. Yes, in a larger sense I work for food and shelter but when I wake up, I pour myself a cup of coffee and make some toast. The spider doesn’t wake up to a larder of food. If she wants to eat, she must build her web, trap the mosquitoes, and hope that her web stands up to the nightly assault in time for her to eat. And when she wakes up, it’s ground zero. A Sisyphean task.
Before we feel too sorry for the spider, a recent study in the Science of Nature Journal, as reported in the Washington Post, estimated that spiders eat somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey a year. “That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.” As the Post captioned its article, “Spiders could theoretically eat every human on earth in one year” (March 28, 2017).
A spider’s web is twenty times the size of the spider. That’s some work. She deserves a few mosquitoes.