North Star Writers Group

While human beings weave their political sleights of hand in the nation’s capital and elsewhere, web spinners of a different kind have been working overtime in Texas.

Some 12 different kinds of spiders banded together to produce a web measuring 200 square feet in a state park next to Lake Tawakoni, about 50 miles east of Dallas. According to news reports, this mega-web looks more like a canopy and covers a pond that became swollen with water after the torrential rains of the spring and early summer.

The resulting prime hunting conditions fostered highly unusual cooperation among eight-legged critters who are normally solitary stalkers and even cannibals. Experts theorize that their web-canopy co-op enables them to exploit to the utmost the bumper harvest of mosquitoes and other flying banquets arising from or attracted to the freshly renewed pool of water.

Reports of this über web, combined with all the media hyperventilation about General David Patraeus’s non-report on Iraq, call to mind the E.B. White children’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web”. In a barn on a farm lives a piglet named Wilbur, a litter runt who becomes the pet of a girl named Fern. Now that he’s growing up, he’s most likely destined for a date with the butcher, much to the consternation of all the farm animals, not to mention Wilbur himself.

Enter Charlotte A. Cavatica, an arachnid clever enough to embed the words, “Some Pig,” in her web. That and ensuing web messages spark a frenzy of human interest and activity, all focusing on the presumably extraordinary porker while entirely missing the real story: an insect better versed in English than too many of today’s high school graduates.

Meanwhile, Charlotte’s real-life cousins do not give out feel-good vibes like pandas or kittens. They make most of us uneasy and terrify many. This still unexplained human dread of spiders is aptly summed up in the arachnophobe’s worst nightmare – Shelob, of the epic fantasy “Lord of the Rings”, the gargantuan hunter with a taste for two-legged prey.

Despite their overall creepiness, spiders still have lessons to offer us, provided we can stop shuddering long enough to pay attention. For one thing, they are utterly tenacious and endlessly patient. No matter how impossible the task appears, a spider will build its web. If that web is destroyed, the spider simply rebuilds. And then it waits. And waits. And waits some more. Sooner or later, food arrives in the form of some hapless critter blundering into the web owner’s virtually invisible silken trap.

Spiders may also be far smarter than we humans want to believe. They certainly are problem-solvers, a characteristic usually associated with higher intelligence. Every spring as I walk out into my front yard to retrieve the newspaper, I invariably break through some enterprising arachnid’s handiwork strung out between the magnolia tree and the mailbox, blocking my path. We go through this a few times, and then the web moves someplace where I don’t damage it on my daily routine. Spiders learn quickly how to avoid needless effort.

If spiders display some positive characteristics, like providing natural mosquito control, they are also messy eaters. Beneath any web invariably are piles of the dried-out remains of the specials du jour. It looks like those very casual eateries where patrons pry the flesh out of all the shellfish they can wolf down and then dump the leavings on the floor. Not much fun for the clean-up crew. Bring on the spider-eating lizards!

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