Spiders and their symmetrical solitude
Spiders, like most insects, are cringey at first but tend to grow upon one’s thoughts… tactical predators, mathematical geniuses, eight-legged freaks, masters of silk, artistic abseilers… spiders weave their own little worlds, an ability once revered by older cultures, from cave paintings to the lore of Brutus… and now inextricably intertwined with the human conscience, manifested in the ubiquitous www…
In some sense there’s a tinge of cruelty to its subsistence, one ponders, looking at a hapless critter being slowly devoured by a silver orb spider, dissolving the creature live in its enzymes and quite literally sucking the life out of it… flailing butterflies and flies on some webs and bugs who’d given up as soon as they realized their folly on the rest… ’twas the monsoons and these spiders were a dime a dozen, the translucent symmetry of their webs occupying every bit of empty space between plants…
But then there’s all that elaborate artistry around this construct of entrapment… the pleasing aesthetics of the web reminding how commonplace the Fibonacci sequence is… thin elastic frames that inform of incoming food through silent vibrations… structures that are perfect despite their temporary nature… fickle existence yet fecund imagination… spiders are skilled calculators it seems, from mixing all sorts of silks to weave the lattices they call home to setting ambushes, they reside in a cocoon of precision, one of their own making…
They’ve even managed to find their bearings in space, the arachnids, making do with light when devoid of gravity… the kind of dogged determination that comes with an existence steeped in patience and solitude, one presumes… the orb spiders wait all day, shaking the dew off the web in the morning as they move away from the centre to crouch in a corner and wait, the black of their legs resembling stilettos, leaving but the slightest of ripples in their tapestry lest it might spook a potential prey…
Musing on decorative orb weaver spiders (Leucauge decorate), Ranikhet, Uttarakhand, India