by Burt Glover
August 27, 2023

There are some who might accuse me of being easily amused. Okay, I’ll just plead guilty to that, here and now, but hear me out. This is day five that I’ve witnessed a leaf from the Water Oak tree in my front yard spinning from the end of a 6-inch-long strand of spider web. Five days of spinning in the late summer breezes like a whirly-gig, and the strand of silk holds steady. No visible twisting or breakage. Aren’t spider webs amazing? For that matter, aren’t the spiders that spin them amazing?

That spinning leaf is only one of many in my tree. Like it or not, spiders, and their webs, are everywhere. Go out on a foggy morning when the sun is just beginning to break through and you will see so many thousands of spider webs streaming off of trees, weeds, porch ceilings, and power lines; webs strewn across the fields like so many handkerchiefs in the morning sun, silk trailing from every conceivable surface. Many surveys have been done to estimate spider populations. On the conservative side, there is the figure of 6 to 10 spiders per square meter. That translates to 40,461 spiders per acre of land. Some estimates go much higher. An entomological survey of North Carolina homes found spiders in 100% of the homes surveyed. Spiders are everywhere! Likely there is one watching you from a nearby corner as you read this. 

Spider silk is several times stronger than any other known silk. Its strength is five times that of similar diameter steel, or any other man-made substance, but is extremely stretch resistant and lightweight at the same time. A spider web might contain several types of silk — a softer, sticky silk to capture prey, and stronger silk to attach the web from stem to branch. The tensile strength of the silk of the golden orb weaver is said to be among the strongest. I can attest to this.

One recent autumn, I found the remains of an enormous and elaborately woven web of a golden orb weaver. The web had been held aloft by powerful “guy wires,” one of which was strung a 15-foot distance from the barn soffit to the limb of a tulip poplar. Fallen poplar leaves had become entangled in the saffron-colored silk. The sight of it drew my curiosity. I had to tug really hard to detach it from the tree. It never broke. The silk had the look, feel and strength of synthetic sewing thread and was easily as strong. I put a strand of blue sewing thread beside it for comparison.

I found a photo of a cape that was woven from golden orb weaver silk. Look closely to see the hand-sewn brocade spiders. This cape was part of a project in Madagascar that took years and the silk of over a million golden orb weaver spiders to complete. The methods for extracting the silk from spiders, while presented as benign in a video on this project, seem anything but or I’d go into more detail.

Many studies are ongoing to produce bullet-proof vests from spider silk. Silkworms, when gathered together, are totally non-competitive, freely spinning their silk. Spiders are not as hospitable, tending to want to eat each other. Not good for mass production. The human solution? Insert spider silk-producing genes into goat embryos. When grown to adults, these goats will produce milk from which spider web proteins can be extracted. These Frankensteinian experiments are ongoing, but it is foretold that, someday, we will all be wearing spider silk clothing. 

Meanwhile, I will spend my time watching my spinning leaves and admiring the hardworking creatures that produce them. I cannot help but fall in love with the teddy bear-like jumping spiders that hop about the porch railing, watching me with a curiosity that matches my own.

There, too, are the beautiful black and yellow garden spiders, Agriopes, spinning and mending their late-summer webs. Nearby is a green lynx spider poised on the petal of a water hyacinth. Down below are the ferocious wolf spiders, there to keep the populations of less desirable insects in check. Inside my house are the southern house spiders who oversee the crevices and crannies, snaring insect intruders in the house.

Worldwide, spiders are estimated to eat 400,000 to 800.000 tons of prey per year. (The Titanic weighed 52,000 tons.) At the same time, these huge populations of spiders provide a major food source for birds, lizards, toads, frogs, dragonflies, etc. It is all about life and living. It may be trivial to some, but our survival as humans may well depend on spiders and the continuity of this chain of life. 

I defer to the words of E. B. White in his reference to writing Charlotte’s Web (a story that many of us should probably read again and again):

“Once you begin watching spiders, you haven’t time for much else– the world is really loaded with them. I do not find them repulsive or revolting, any more than I find anything else in nature repulsive or revolting, and I think that it is too bad that children are often corrupted by their elders in this hate campaign.” 

Contributor Burt Glover became an accidental naturalist during his earliest childhood days exploring the dirt roads, backyards, polo field and barns of the Magnolia-Knox-Mead neighborhood of 1950s Aiken. Birds are his first love, and he can identify an impressive range by song alone. He asserts that he is an observer, not an expert, on the topics of his writings, which range from birds, box turtles, frogs and foraging, to wasps, weeds, weather and beyond.