Some deterrent thoughts the next time you go spider-bashing
PAUL JOHNSON
Last week I awoke on a dewy, shiny morning to find that a synod of spiders had transformed our bird-table into a masterpiece of theatrical art. This wooden contraption is by no means simple. It is a rustic house with many mansions, so that birds of different sizes can feast together without getting in each other's way. The birds like it and so, I think, do flies, which harvest the minute crumbs that even the tiniest tits have left. The spiders had noticed this too, and last week they put into action a plan that was just as complex, in its own way, as President Bush's military strategy to change the regime in Iraq.
The plan was octagonal. On each of seven sides of the bird-house the spiders had spun an all-encompassing silk net. They left the eighth side open, thus tempting those flies with good eyesight which can see webs and avoid them. But even the eighth side was hung with a number of treacherous single threads to catch flies that had got inside, panicked at seeing the nets, and were rushing to get out. Once in the house, the chance of a fly emerging was small. Several families of spiders must have combined in this operation. Even a small orb-and-spokes web takes one spider an hour to spin and fix in place; and these seven were big ones. But it is common for spiders to work together. Indeed, some tropical spiders live by the hundred in vast communal webs which serve as home and fortress as well as trapping system, and engage in Lticullan feasts to devour their prey. These communal banquets, attended chiefly by females, are notable for prodigious appetites.
There are many mysteries about web-spinning. The patience of spiders is proverbial, and the speed and thoroughness with which they repair damaged webs and strengthen weak ones hold lessons for all military commanders. But we do not know how they avoid sticking to their own threads while they scramble about their work, or how they snip them off. Spiders produce at least seven different kinds of silk, which have variable qualities of elasticity and adhesion for distinct purposes. For instance, if a spider wants to move quickly, it releases a thread of heavy silk and is carried by air currents to its destination, an activity known as 'ballooning'. The spokes of the orb require much less material but must be strong and gluey. One of the marvels of spider life is the way in which they construct diabolically lethal webs with the absolute minimum use of silk. But it is precisely this
strict economy of means that gives the webs their astonishing beauty.
Economy is one of the secrets of great art. I have often noticed how few strokes great draughtsmen such as Fragonard and Hokusai need to create their illusions; and how few words accomplished writers such as Jane Austen or Evelyn Waugh require to bring a character to life or achieve a telling effect. Phil May's famous sketch of the ancient Gladstone on the front bench was achieved in only 37 lines. The spider is producing silk from its own body, and knows to the nearest micromillimetre how much to release without weakening the structure. The result is a monochrome masterpiece, something wildly beyond the skills even of a Beardsley. If you doubt this, by designing an orb-and-spokes web yourself, then compare the result with an accurate photograph of the real thing. Moreover, a web is in three dimensions. not two, and in strong early-morning sunlight casts minute and subtle shadows on itself. Its silk also reflects, refracts and bisects the sunbeams, so that a complex display like the one I saw achieves a majesty of beauty beyond the power of human art. We take it for granted and can destroy it with a fingertip, but each web is unique and the work of a living, calculating creature. Whatever else they are, spiders are great artists.
The trouble is, spiders are unpopular. I recall, many years ago, reading a powerful essay by Bernard Levin about his terror and hatred of spiders. Arachnophobia is common, and most people suffer from it to some degree. Now I like spiders, as well as admire them, and would never willingly kill one or suffer others to do so. I note that Victor Hugo, the 200th anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year, wrote, love spiders and nettles, because others hate them.' I have no strong feelings about nettles, though they are instructive and fun to draw. But spiders, it seems to me, hold many lessons for us, and irrational antipathy prevents us from learning from them. Needless to say, they long antedate Homo sapiens. There have been spiders on earth for at least 350 million years, probably much longer. Their variety is beyond our capacity to take in. One kind alone has more than 4,000 subspecies. Their survival and proliferation testify to their extraordinary tricks, dodges and accomplishments; their ability to work singly or in communities and, I am tempted to say, their brain
power. But we know little about their brains, or their wills, or their eyesight, which can produce multiple banks of eyes in a variety of formations.
Of course, these eye-banks are off-putting. So are the hairs, which become visible above a certain size. I once got a horrid shock in Belo Horizonte, a Brazilian town, when an enormous, hirsute and reddish-hued spider emerged from my hotel bed as I prepared for repose. I assumed that it was a tarantula or worse. A certain passage from a Fleming novel, when Bond awakes to find such a thing drinking the sweat on his chest, flashed before my eyes. However, the spider was even more afraid of me than I was of it, and vanished. There followed then the quite different fear of sleeping in a room in which a giant spider lay concealed, so well described by Mark Twain in Roughing It, where escaped spiders keep a dozen Irishmen awake all night. In fact, few spiders kill: in Britain only the Black Widow and the Brown Recluse are dangerous to humans. I was probably in more peril when I went for a swim in the Caspian Sea. I had been doing a television interview with the last Shah of Iran in his houseboat. After my dip I returned to find a scorpion peering uneasily out of one of my shoes. I soon 'accounted for him' as fox-hunters say. There is nothing to be said for scorpions, in my book. Their bites are nearly always nasty. Some of them in Africa are eight or more inches long, and kill (it is said) more than 5,000 humans a year.
But I have never heard of a spider killing anyone. They are, or ought to be, a friend of mankind. We call them nasty names: bird-eaters, ogre-faced, spitting spiders, wolf-spiders and so on. But none of their activities does us harm. Quite the contrary. They are the most efficient form of insect control in the whole of nature, granted their vast numbers and ubiquity. It is said that the Israelis have used them as such in fruit orchards, and that Chinese rice farmers have long domesticated spiders. But I suspect that more could be done. Spiders could teach us how to produce liquid silk of the highest quality which solidifies when exposed to air. What might not a dressdesigner do with that? Spiders were the first to develop an underwater air-bell, a practicable hair-comb, and chemical warfare. Some can make themselves change colour — if we could learn that secret, might we not solve the race problem? But all most of us do to spiders is bash them.
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