Humans in Monsters’ Bodies
By Dana Wilde
My fascination with spiders started 10 or 12 years ago amid an overall self-generated awakening to the details of the woods. I was head-first in flower, tree, bird, and bug facts I had never taken time to really sort out because the feelings of awe always seemed more important than the mastery of names. But the names started to feel like a layer of the different kinds of awe – a flock of Canada geese reflects one facet of cosmic beauty, a pair of blister beetles copulating on a rose petal another. These birds and bugs, I was thinking, have names that might be illuminating.
It turned out to be complicated. Branta canadensis is an object; a flock of geese rising over the lake in still evening air is something else.
A black-and-yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia) busy at work in the park in Unity, Maine.
Photo by Dana Wilde
Another thing was the population of black-and-yellow garden spiders that had set up their orb webs in the brush at the Unity park. If one noticed you getting too close, she started bouncing her web, as if she was stuck to a vertical trampoline. Maybe the bouncing web was a threat, or maybe a diversion, or a blurring tactic, who knows exactly what she thought she was doing.
Whatever else was happening, the spider was: 1. watching me and 2. thinking.
Now, to remain grounded in the real world of natural fact, you have to immediately realize that what the words “watching” and “thinking” refer to in a spider’s experience can’t possibly be the same as what they refer to in a human’s experience. You can see that the garden spider is small, it lives in a web, it’s constantly at risk of being attacked and swallowed by huge beings from above or below, and it visits its own shocking savagery on smaller beings yet. A spider takes completely different meaning from its surroundings than humans do. But it is, nonetheless, meaning.
Jumping spiders, I soon discovered, have much better eyesight than garden spiders. When you encounter them, they look right at you in ways the garden spiders can’t. Dimorphic jumping spiders (Maevia inclemens), in a study, reacted to videos of prey and potential mates as if they were real. It’s not known if a spider can recognize you personally, but in other studies, bees learned to distinguish between human faces. And jumping spiders watch you.
Spiders communicate with each other. For example, mated cellar spiders (family Pholcidae) send vibrations through web silk that are secret messages – “It’s me, don’t eat me!” Dewdrop spiders (Neospintharus) send vibrations that trick other spiders into coming out of their own webs to be attacked and eaten. Spiders detect sound waves, too, and process them to extract information about their surroundings – meaning that in their own way, spiders hear.
You might think their brains are too small to be generating anything like what we call “meaning.” But recent theories of mental capacities suggest that it’s not the number of brain cells that matters in intelligence; rather, the proportion of the brain’s physical size to the body’s physical size is a better indicator of a being’s relative intelligence. Crow brains are much smaller than chimpanzee brains, but studies indicate crows are every bit as clever as chimps. Some species of orchard spiders (e.g., Leucage mariana) and jumping spiders (e.g., Phidippus clarus) have brains so big that they spill down into their body cavities and legs early in life, when they’re still spiderlings.
What are the upper limits of a spider’s sentience?
Some engineers in Great Britain taught regal jumping spiders (Phidippus regius) to leap between platforms so they could observe the mechanics of the spiders’ leg motion; the training, interestingly, did not involve food bait, and not all the spiders learned the trick. But some took a challenge and solved a problem. Somehow, spiders think. Whatever that means.
Studies of a velvet spider (Stegodyphus dumicola) native to the desert in southern Africa showed that traits such as boldness, shyness, and task specialization within spider social structures varied from individual to individual in changing circumstances. Other studies on wolf spiders have made similar findings. Meaning that some spiders, at least, have individual personalities.
We can’t get carried away and start speculating about spider philosophers meditating in the brush at the park – that’s science fiction (Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel Children of Time, for example). But we can at least take seriously the idea that sentience has many more facets than only the ability to reason abstractly and then talk about it. Big brains, complex webs. Spiders are having experiences we can probably never understand, the same way we’re having experiences they can never understand.
My wife, Bonnie, loves her backyard encounters with nature’s cosmic beauty. She likes to drive the back road through nearby Thorndike to see the Canada geese drift on the still water of a pond there. Mysterious, they perennially are, beautiful. She’s not interested in their scientific name. But they seem almost human to her. By what lake’s edge or pool will they build after they fly away, she wonders, and what will that family’s life be like?
“They’re like the best part of people, and with wings,” she says.
Spiders are a different story. Strange. Alien-looking. Threatening.
But they’re just making a living like us, I always say, and like the geese and everybody else, and the vast majority of them aren’t the least bit dangerous to humans.
My words avail not much.
“They give me the creeps,” she says.
“They’re just humans in monsters’ bodies,” I say. “Anyway, thank goodness they’re small. Who knows
what they’d be thinking about us.”
MES member Dana Wilde lives in Troy, Maine. This essay first appeared in slightly different form in the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel newspapers. He can be reached at naturalist1@dwildepress.net.
