Monday, October 30, 2017

Halloween and Spiders


Halloween and Spiders

Halloween is here again. Houses are decorated with witches, pumpkins, ghosts and goblins. And, of course, with spider webs. I coated our front bushes with white webs and put up wire webs on the garage doors. It’s fun to decorate for the holiday.

But Mother Nature outdid all the webs in the neighborhood. A spider worked its way down from the roof of our garage and spun a magnificent web that made my attempts laughable. It anchored the bottom of the web on a bush and then sat in the middle waiting around for a meal to be caught. 

Spider webs are well constructed. The spider has a plan. It mixes non-sticky threads with sticky ones in a symmetrical design. And it does it fairly quickly for such complexity. A spider might be small but don’t diminish its capabilities: it has spider smarts.

The more I observe nature, the more I realize that everything has intelligence. Plants do. Insects do. Animals and birds are pretty darn smart. It may differ from how we think but it is functional for how to survive. If we diminish anything in nature we lessen our own understanding of life.

So on this spooky holiday, when we say WOOOOO, let’s remember it is more than being scary, it is being observant.

A look at web-making:
Get to know spiders: