Learning at daddy-long-legs’ knee

Originally published 31 August 1998

For a few months each sum­mer, I live in a cot­tage in the west of Ire­land that is unoc­cu­pied for the remain­der of the year. When we arrive in June, every nook and cran­ny is occu­pied by one or more com­mon cel­lar spi­ders, Phol­cus pha­lan­gioides, some­times called “dad­dy-long-legs.”

My wife’s first impulse is to take a broom and go squish­ing and swish­ing her way through the house. My own instinct is to let the spi­ders be: They are harm­less, vir­tu­al­ly invis­i­ble, and — with the aid of a mag­ni­fy­ing glass — delight­ful to observe.

When my wife’s killing sweep is done, despite her best efforts, there are still dozens of spi­ders in cor­ners beyond her reach or on the porch or in the store room. Enough spi­ders for a hap­py sum­mer of spider-watching.

I have been watch­ing a Phol­cus sus­pend­ed in a tan­gle of threads from the under­side of the shelf above my desk. The head is about the size of a pin­head, the bul­bous, cylin­dri­cal abdomen some­what larg­er. Most­ly the spi­der is all legs — eight long, crooked, translu­cent legs, black at the joints.

All morn­ing long the spi­der has sat unmov­ing in its web, sus­pend­ed upside down; one might think it is dead. How­ev­er, if I touch the web with a pen­cil point, the spi­der goes into a crazy dance, whirling furi­ous­ly. Sev­er­al times I test this reflex, won­der­ing what is its pur­pose. To more thor­ough­ly ensnare a prey? To fright­en preda­tors? To make itself an invis­i­ble blur? The dance is instinc­tive. It is not some­thing the spi­der learns. It is an evolved reflex, encod­ed in the spi­der’s DNA — a whirling dervish gene.

This nor­mal­ly seden­tary crea­ture sits and waits for its food to come to it. Insects that bum­ble into the web are quick­ly wrapped with silk. The spi­der injects a digest­ing flu­id into the prey’s body, then sucks out the liq­uidy innards. I read some­where that a Phol­cus spi­der can emp­ty a fly by suck­ing at the tip of a leg!

Of course, like all ani­mals, the spi­der must make more of its own kind. The sex­u­al­ly mature male must find and court a female, pre­sum­ably no small thing for the indi­vid­ual I am watch­ing, since the near­est oth­er Phol­cus, that I can see, of uncer­tain sex, is sus­pend­ed in a cor­ner of the ceil­ing 10 feet away.

Mat­ing can take hours: a ter­ri­ble tan­gle of legs. The male deposits a wispy wal­let of semen into a spe­cial cav­i­ty in the out­er uterus of the female, where the sperm resides until she uses it to fer­til­ize her eggs. The female lays 20 or so eggs, which she car­ries in her jaws in a silk cocoon.

Prenymphs hatch from the eggs. A week or so lat­er these shed their skins and tiny baby spi­ders emerge. They might hold onto their moth­er’s face for a time, then scam­per off to fend for themselves.

I have watched most acts of this curi­ous dra­ma, but one big mys­tery remains. Accord­ing to my guide­book, this species of spi­der is unknown out-of-doors in Ire­land, which rais­es the ques­tion of how it man­aged to col­o­nize our house in the first place; the house was built new and far from any neighbor.

It is tempt­ing to imag­ine count­less young Phol­cus aero­nauts on silk para­chutes float­ing out of win­dows, across fields and hedgerows, into oth­er doors or win­dows. It is prob­a­bly the rare Irish coun­try house, no mat­ter how immac­u­late­ly main­tained, that does not in some dusty cor­ner har­bor its Phol­cus.

To deep­en the mys­tery, this spi­der thrives on every con­ti­nent except Antarc­ti­ca — and per­haps there, too, for all I know — which means this leg­gy arach­nid, for all of its seden­tary ways, man­ages to get around with remark­able efficiency.

The spi­der’s far-flung flights are a kind of rev­e­la­tion, its web a gauzy scrip­ture. Far from wast­ing time this morn­ing, I know that my obser­va­tions of the spi­der have taught me as much about myself as about Phol­cus, for we are all part of the same web of life.

I would go as far as to say that my atten­tions to the spi­der are a kind of prayer. Ralph Wal­do Emer­son defined prayer this way: “Prayer is the con­tem­pla­tion of the facts of life from the high­est point of view. It is the solil­o­quy of a behold­ing and jubi­lant soul.”

My behold­ings of Phol­cus are cer­tain­ly jubi­lant: Canopies of silk, black knees, tan­gled legs, gos­samer pack­ets of sperm. Add to these the female with a face full of tiny off­spring, and that unseen sequence of pro­tein-build­ing chem­i­cals some­where along the spi­der’s DNA that encodes the dervish dance.

This is Emer­son­’s prayer: To intrude our­selves into the fab­ric of the world; to qui­et the insis­tent mur­mur­ings of self long enough to under­stand that we all exist in a greater matrix of life, and that all life exists in a yet greater matrix of mat­ter and ener­gy. The object of such a prayer need not be the star-span­gled dome of heav­en, or the majesty of waves crash­ing on a shore. It can be as sub­tle as a thread-legged spi­der in a gos­samer nest.

God told Eli­jah to stand on the moun­tain: “Then Yah­weh him­self went by. There came a mighty wind so strong it tore the moun­tains and shat­tered the rocks before Yah­weh. But Yah­weh was not in the wind. After the wind came an earth­quake. But Yah­weh was not in the earth­quake. After the earth­quake came a fire. But Yah­weh was not in the fire. And after the fire there came the sound of a gen­tle breeze. And when Eli­jah heard this, he cov­ered his face with his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”

Eli­jah went to the entrance of his cave and attend­ed the breeze. And on the breeze came a flotil­la of baby spi­ders, rid­ing in gon­do­las of silk.