on Spiders

My grandparents had a bay window overlooking the Columbia River.  On the outside the window was flanked by two tall Italian Cedars, the columnar type.  This made a perfect place for garden spiders to spin their webs and a perfect place for me to sit at the dining room table and watch them without fear.  I've always had a love/hate relationship with spiders.  Well, let me take that back, I've always had a hate relationship with them.

This particular bay window would, at any given time except the winter months, have at least four garden spider webs, one for each corner.  For one week straight I monitored the spiders' behavior.  At the beginning of the week they could catch an insect and hurriedly encase it in silk.  For the rest of the week they would dine on this feast while hundreds of other insects landed, became entangled, extracted themselves and flew off.  At the end of the week the spiders would cut their drained meal loose and begin repairs on their now ragged web.

I use this very scientific observation on the behavior of garden spiders to point out to my esteemed friends that spiders do not actually provide the valuable service of reducing the insect population by any vast degree.  In the same week I was observing the spiders, I also watch birds swoop down and consume hundreds of insects, sometimes directly from the spider webs.  On a couple of occasions I saw the birds pluck a spider from a web as well.  You see?  Science proves that birds are better than spiders and spiders are nearly useless.  Although I do admit to being biased against the arachnids, but my observations still stand.

When I was a teen, our front door had a screen door mounted outside.  This left just enough room, about six inches for two garden spiders to build webs in the upper corners.  When I was about to kill them (sorry to my Buddhist friends) my father stopped me.  He claimed that he wanted the spiders left alone because they would  "stop insects from getting into the house".  Presumably this was what the screen door's function was.  My father also had a mean streak in him.  He loved to poke people; to provoke them mercilessly for his own amusement.  He knew I hated spiders, thus it was fun for him to make me leave these ones alone.  I started using the back door of the house since there was no way I was going to use the front door with two spiders within a foot of my head.  No way.

One evening my parents took my sister into town and I was left on my own.  I didn't waste too much time going to the garage, looking for some kind of insecticide.  All I found was some Ortho (TM) Wasp Spray.  I know that spiders aren't insects, but I figured it was pure poison so it should work.  I stealthily opened the front door.  There were the spiders, sitting snuggly in the center of their quite beautiful webs.  I think I heard them mocking me, but that could have been my imagination.

I held up the can and pressed the button.  A stream of white launched forward, directly on target.  I hit one, then the other, coating them with the poison.  They dropped from their webs, without a single scream.  The skin-crawling and "heebee-jeebees" finally caught up to me and I went and collapsed on the couch, exhausted from my battle.

A few minutes later I heard a strange pop sound.  It was loud and slightly echoed in the entryway.  It sounded like a small champagne cork had been let loose.  I decided to investigate.  As I rounded the corner I could see a pile of white foam on the tile floor.  This was evidently all that was left of one of the spiders.  Then I saw the other spider.  His or her abdomen or opisthosoma has grown to three or four times its normal size and was bright white.  The spider was shaking violently, somehow still able to stand on its eight wobbly legs.  Then it exploded with a very loud popping sound and the an area about twelve inches in diameter was coated with white foam.

I grew sick and nearly vomited.  I was trembling all over and so returned to the couch.  I sat there in a nauseated daze for a very long time.

I finally got up the nerve to get a sponge-mop and clean up of the scene of my crime.  When my father came home and inquired about the spiders, I simply shrugged.  No more questions were asked.