Spiders

One morning not so long ago when I was in northeastern Massachusetts, I started noticing small spider webs on the rounded hump of a bush in a suburban front yard. As I looked around the bush, it became clear that there were very many webs. Dozens of them, if not hundreds, covering most of the outer layer of the bush. The spiders themselves were quite small. They sat in the center of their webs with their long front legs extended before them, looking like a smudge or flaw in the web.

A lot of superlatives surround spiders. The tens of thousands found in the average acre of meadow, for instance. The distances the wind can blow them when they launch themselves into the breeze on long streamers of silk. The conservative estimate of 40,000 species found in the world (3,400 in the U.S. & Canada). The incredible strength of spider silk. The way some people shriek when they run into one of them….

I have them both inside and outside my Brooklyn apartment. They are one of our most common visible invertebrates.

I remember once cleaning the lid of a backyard hibachi after it had sat all winter in a shed. It was dusty as all get out. I was using a stick to whack out the dried gunk, and ran across a little clump in an inside corner. The clump began to move, to bubble, to swarm. I’d broken open a spider egg case, the first time I’d ever seen one. The uncountable tiny baby spiders were all over the place.

More recently, in the same yard as above: a leaf was suspended in some webbing; when I turned it over, I found all these baby spiders next to their egg case. I put the leaf back into the webbing after snapping a picture. On your way, spiderlets….