Chicago Spiders

BEING a spider in Chicago is a very unsatisfactory vocation. In the evening, when it is time to take down the old web and put up the new, a spider will gather a section into a ball or skein that is positively black, and kick it out behind him into the street below as if he were disgusted with such a grimy mess. It is so bulky with dirt that a small piece of web makes a large armful for him. And after the new one has been spread for an hour or two, its sticky filaments are so coated with particles of atmosphere that it will hardly catch anything else. Only by going through a sort of jumping-jack performance can a Chicago spider manage to make a fly stick.

Whether a country spider, with a whole garden fence at his disposal, takes down his old web, I do not know, though it would seem that there he could, by merely moving a foot or two, save himself all the work; but in Chicago, where corner locations are the most valuable, — especially the corners of windows where house flies long to enter, — and where each corner is preëmpted by a particular spider, the taking down of the old web is necessary to the greatest daily profit. It pays better than to move.

A Chicago spider can take down a web and put up another in about twenty minutes — and from this I am anxious to have the reader infer that the daily presence of a great number of them does not mean a neglected window. If any one thinks his household guiltless in this regard, let him observe his own window closely. I daresay he will find this story sumptuously illustrated.

Before I was laid on a bed by a window and tied down as firmly as any Gulliver by Chicago pygmies, most of whom belonged to the tribe of Typhus, I would have considered it poor employment for any man to enter into the affairs of creatures so much smaller than himself. But they did shrewd things before my eyes every day, and when I began to understand, I became interested; and thus, for three weeks, I found myself bound out to the trade.

It was the jumping-jack trick that I first discovered and appreciated. The spider, sitting patiently at the focus of his elastic wheel with all legs on the lines, is in telegraphic communication with every part of it; and now let a fly so much as flutter a filament, and the spider jumps up and down as if he were trying to shake the whole structure from its moorings. This bounces the fly till he has his feet solidly on the line, and perhaps tangled in other lines. After taking this precaution, the spider, if he has been lucky, runs out and ties up his victim in the usual bundle, ready to carry. He does up a fly like a turkey trussed and ready for the table.

To one who has had a motionless and half-forgotten spider in his eye for an hour or so, this sudden exhibition of vigor in jumping up and down is startling. He does it as if he were in a great fit of temper. From this practice it is evident that he cannot depend upon the web alone to catch the prey, and hold it long enough for him to get out to it. The web is not merely a stationary snare, like a tree with birdlime on it, but a contrivance that may be operated personally by the spider as a trap. The structure, being elastic, works up and down when he jumps, so that each row of lines traverses at least the distance between it and the next row of lines. Thus, despite the open spaces between them, he is virtually in possession of the whole plane of space, for anything with air-disturbing wings can hardly pass through it without sending in an alarm and being caught. All spiders, I suppose, know this trick of the trade; but a Chicago spider must stick to his post and practice it in every case. If he did not, his daily catch would be all soot and no flies.

The same spiders did not occupy the window throughout the three weeks; but with the exception of one red spider who came along and seemed very doubtful about setting to work, they were all of one kind, big and little. This auburnhued spider was more slender and shapely — not so fat and commercial-looking as the others. There were little spiders who spun little webs of such fineness that they were visible only when the sun fell just right on the glinting new gossamer; and for over a week a very big fellow, with a yellow hieroglyph on him like gold bullion on the back of a priest, held sway in webs a foot across. He sat with his back toward the room, whereas most of them made a practice of keeping their under sides toward the window. In this, there seems to be a difference in practice; but all of them sit upside down — head downwards — invariably.

I discovered, to my own satisfaction at least, why a spider sits in his web upside down. A spider has eight legs, besides a very short pair in front which are more like arms; but in truth a spider’s legs are all fingers, and he needs as many as possible to handle his prey. Were he to support himself right-side-up in grappling with a victim, it would require four of the legs merely to hold him in that position, for he would have to grasp more than one thread; but he can hang head-down wards with only the one hind pair of legs, and have all the rest free to handle the prey before him. His hind pair of legs extend almost straight behind him for the purpose of being his sole support in such cases; and because he is built in this way, in order to cope successfully with other insects, the upside-down attitude is his easiest way of staying on watch. It is his most restful position.

One of the big spiders was one day surprised by a chrysalis that fell down from some place into his web. It turned out to be a very windfall of fortune, for the luscious larva was quite to his taste. At least, he examined it thoroughly, and kept it, as if he were satisfied with what he found inside of the cocoon. It was almost as long as himself, and he showed great dexterity in turning it about and examining it in all positions with his six free legs, holding it before him as he hung head-downwards. A spider can handle himself in all positions with equal facility, and when he is surprised he will suddenly turn head-upward as he surveys the web, and keep that position for a while. But when all is quiet on the Potomac, he turns upside-down again and takes his ease.

I read in a book review that the male spider is said to dance in order to please his inamorata. I have seen such a performance, and would describe it as follows. One of the spiders retreats backward an inch or two from the other; he pauses there a moment and advances; and, when the two are face to face, they go through certain antics, both of them, with their front legs. It is exactly as if one were to interlock his fingers loosely and then twiddle them. After this twiddling of legs, the visitor backs up, pauses, and comes forward again; and they will keep up this performance for quite a while. Whether this is flirtation I do not know; much less do I understand the code. And whether it is dancing or not depends upon — the figure of speech.

These spiders, according to the dictionary, are geometrical or garden spiders; but the ones with whom I was personally acquainted saw nothing more verdant than a rubber plant and one smokeblasted tree. This ailing tree was the only survivor in those parts, and so its twiggery had to accommodate the sparrows of a large territory every evening; it was little more than a community perch or convention tree, and it had more sparrows on it than leaves. Regularly they would come home to Bedlam at night, and they would seem much excited over the return to nature. As to the spiders, they were garden spiders in the sense that Chicago is the Garden City.

Before proceeding further, I must explain that this comment on the secrets of the craft is merely by way of introducing the reader to a particular spider, who had an admirable adventure. I shall come to him later on. I should confess that I do not know spiders anatomically or microscopically, but only personally: — I know only that about a spider which he knows himself, namely, his trade. This, I think, is worth describing, step by step.

It will be best to take a Chicago spider who is building in the upper corner of a window, for here is a set of conditions which are uniform throughout the country, and which every one is familiar with. The spider, having found this unoccupied place, walks on the windowframe away from the corner and stops at the right distance for the size of his web, which depends upon the size of the spider. The corner of the window-frame offers the foundation, or outline, for two sides of his web; but he must himself complete the circumference within which to spread his work. Now, a line stretched from where he stands, on the top frame, to a point on the side frame, will give him a triangle; and he must project this line transversely through the air.

This is easily done. Pressing the end of the line to the window-frame, he takes hold of it with one hind leg and runs along with it to the corner, spinning it out as he goes; and he holds the line out with his hind leg like a boy flying a kite. He must hold it well out and keep it taut, for it must not touch the wood anywhere along its length. Having reached the corner, he turns and runs down the side frame; and now it is as if the kite were going up in the air. As he runs downward from the corner, paying out the line, it opens, fanwise, from the upper frame; and when it has formed the triangle he stops and fastens that end.

This is to be his main cable which must, on that side, support the ends of all the lines. And these inner lines are to be stretched with considerable tension. For such a heavy strain the single strand is not enough, so he now runs back and forth along its length and keeps paying out till he has augmented it with several plies of filament — a cable. It is now strong enough, but as the tension on it is to be sidewise it is not rigid enough; it would bow inwards as he stretched the web from it, and so it needs a few small guy-lines, or stays, to brace it. These stays he fastens farther out on the wood, or to points on the glass itself. He could, in fact, as far as his abilities are concerned, fasten every line of his web to the glass; but the wind would blow it against the pane and interfere with its workings. Therefore he makes the cable to stretch it to, a little distance from the window.

The outline or foundation is now done. Inside this triangular circumference he has now to make the spokes of his wheel before stretching upon them the circular lines. In like manner as he put up the main cable, he runs a single line across this triangular space, about the middle of it. Having this line stretched, he climbs to the middle of it and there stops, for this is to be the centre of his wheel. In stretching this diametrical line he has really made two spokes at one operation; but now he must pursue a different method, making one spoke at a time. If he were to try to keep up this way of making two spokes at a time, fastening a line at one side and running around the circumference to the opposite side to fasten it there, his line would become entangled with the one stretched before; it would stick, and he could not raise the new line to the middle of the other where it ought to cross. Therefore he must now work from the middle outwards, stretching one spoke at a time. He fastens the end of the spoke he is about to spin to the middle of this diametrical line, takes this new line in his hind leg in order to hold it free of the other as he climbs it, and thus he gets the spoke to the windowframe. Then he proceeds with it along the window-frame a short distance, the second line opening out, fanwise, from the first; and when it has opened to the proper angle he fastens it down to the wood. He then descends the new one and repeats the operation; and so he keeps on, always using the one he stretched last to return upon and bring out another, and always holding the new line clear and taut as he pays it out, exactly like a boy flying a kite. It must not touch and tangle. And, like the boy, he runs along at a good gait as if he had no time to lose.

By this simple method, the spokes are all put in; and it is very easy according to his system. It is worth considering, however, that he is always very fortunate in coming out so nearly uniform in the spacing of his spokes, — and this in an irregular triangle upon which the spokes must fall at all sorts of distances in order to be equally spaced. He seems to be an expert in division. But it is not the outside of his space that he can measure off in an automatic way, for there the distances are not uniform. I think he must accomplish it all by watching the new line open fanwise from the middle, and so I regard him as a sort of surveyor with a good eye for angles. The wheel part is now done, and he has to weave on it the circling strands.

He takes his place at the middle of the wheel, and keeping his head always toward the centre, he steps sidewise from spoke to spoke, fastening the thread to a spoke, drawing it across to the next one at the right tension, dabbing it down to fasten it, and so on, round and round. And he works with considerable speed.

But this mode of operation cannot be kept up to the end. When he has worked out a short distance from the centre, the radiating spokes are too far apart for him to straddle across. Here he changes the method. Instead of straddling across, he goes out on a single spoke, fastens his thread to it, comes in and crosses to the next spoke by means of the line that he stretched on his last trip around. He then goes out on the next spoke, carrying the line in his hind leg, and fastens it, — and he always handles it with his leg, so that there is no surplus spun out, and it has the right tension. Thus he continues till his wheel is big enough, always using his last circle as a bridge from spoke to spoke as he adds the next surrounding circle. This part, when done, is really a spiral.

The garden spider, in making a web that fulfills the ideal, puts in this spiral I have just described with the lines very far apart — very open. He then starts at the circumference and fills it in finer, working round and round toward the middle. This first spiral may be considered his scaffold. As we see, it was constructed under certain drawbacks; but now that he has so much put in coarsely, he can walk round and round with more footing, and work with less trouble.

When the web seems finished, one thing yet remains to be done. Where the spokes have each been fastened to the centre, there is a mass of fibre, the tagends of the whole job, which would be in his way as he sat in the middle of the web. He takes this out neatly, leaving a hole. Had he taken this out before the spiral was put on, the whole wheel would, of course, have collapsed. He throws the fibre into the street below, and takes his place over the hole with his legs holding the lines around him; and now it is time for Providence to send a fly.

The spider does his work behind his back, as it were; he cannot see what he is doing; and yet in certain of his operations he must make strokes that are instantly accurate and “to the point.” This would call for some miraculous knowledge of location — which he has not; and his way of meeting the problem is interesting. In that division of his work, which consists in stretching the cable and spokes, his problem is simple; it is merely the fastening of sticky threads to the window-frame, a surface which is firm and flat. As it is flat, he does not need to strike a fine particular point on it; and as it is perfectly stable, he simply presses the line down firmly behind him as it comes from his spinneret. But in stretching the spiral from spoke to spoke of the web itself, he must strike a certain point on his line against a particular point on the web, in order to have the right tension; he must unite them firmly at that point and do it at a dab. It is a fine point to find; and to do such work behind him, against a yielding, air-blown filament, is quite a different matter from pressing his line to a flat, firm surface. He proceeds, accordingly, on the same principle, but takes it another way about. Instead of merely dabbing down the line he is spinning, he seizes with a hind leg the line to which he wishes to make a fastening and presses that against a particular part of himself ; that is, he raises the spoke and touches it firmly to the point where the new line is spinning out. Thus the spiral is put in. The whole extraneous difficulty is transmuted into a mere matter of self-knowledge — like finding one’s mouth in the dark.

During this part of the work he does not need to use one leg to prevent entanglement, the parallel spans being shorter and more widely separate from the beginning; and it is lucky for him that he can now spare that member, for in the operations of putting in the spiral his multitude of legs are busy indeed. One is seizing the spoke and dabbing it to his spinneret; one is pressing on the new-spun line, as if to regulate the tension; the others are stepping about lively in order to accommodate his body to the advancing work — and altogether it is as rapid and unobservable as the flight of knitting-needles. But once it is caught by the eye, the mystery of his accuracy is small, and its ingenuity is great. But the very fact that he has to descend to mere ingenuity, in lieu of instinct, which can perform miracles, presents him to us as a humble spinner, and human. I think it is a person of little promise who can look through his web and not find that this display of window-work, spread out between us and the universe, is a sort of trap for the mind, tending to keep it within bounds.

The large spiders, so far as I have observed, are the most careless workmen. In some of their webs the geometrical design could hardly be perceived were it not for the radiating spokes; and these are not straight, but drawn to this side and that by the connecting lines. And these lines, that ought to be the spiral, have been put in any way at all, as if one at a time, here and there; and moreover they have been put in loosely and then tightened to the spoke with other little guy-lines, so that they have the shape of a Y. The web seems to be not only patched, but all patch work from the start. It has the wheel shape in it, however, and the same principles are employed throughout; in fact, there is more individuality and a greater display of mechanical science in such a web than in one that conforms to the ideal. It takes a better mechanic to patch a job than to follow specifications to a successful conclusion. The little spiders do the most perfect work, strikingly geometrical, with the lines of the spiral exactly parallel. I once picked from a bush a withered leaf that had curled up at the end, and in this space, smaller in extent than a quarter of a dollar, was a spider’s web perfect in every detail.

Other webs would differ from this window-web; but the difference would not be in the web proper so much as in the outrigging or foundation for it. In truth, the most interesting part of a spider’s work is not in the geometrical part that excites our first wonder, but in his ways of devising the irregular circumference, the making use of vantage points, the solving of problems peculiar to each set of surroundings. Here is individual work, separate planning to suit each case, the application of principles rather than automatic and uniform procedure — the work of a mechanic.

The opportunities for studying nature in a “flat ” are growing every day. The renaissance of colonial architecture, with the small window panes, allows the spiders to cultivate the whole field of glass. A spider soon learns all about glass; a fly never. The spider works with it familiarly; he even uses its surface to moor the stays of his cable; but the fly buzzes and butts his head against it, utterly unable to learn that the invisible can have existence. The invention of glass was a godsend to spiders, and a sorry thing for flies.

There is much more to the trade of building a web, but so technical in detail that it would have to be considered at much length in order to arrive at the ultimate mechanical reasons (something I have yet to see done in nature study). A thing superficially perceived or half explained might as well not be explained at all. Much “ nature study” consists in these mere semblances of explanations — incomplete perceptions. The most profitable work in this line, I think, would be the work of the skilled mechanic, rather than the poetic “ nature student ” or the mere microscopic observer; for this shrewd stealing of secrets, both by observation and basic reasoning, has been his lifelong attitude in filching his own trade from others, as well as from nature. And as to the writing of it, the simple and luminous expression of such things calls for the very highest and completest set of mental faculties. Contrary to the popular notion, the creation of so-called “atmospheric” impression in literature is much easier, and of a lower order of intellect, than to convey in familiar words exactly what was done, and why. This also takes imagination.

But, as I have said, it was not my intention, in writing this, to record all that I learned of the trade so far as I advanced, but rather to make public a tragicomedy that was enacted in spider life. To recount all that I observed would be robbing the reader of his privilege of discovering things for himself, — even denying him the right to look out of his own window, — which is one of the things I protest against. I have told this much because it was necessary thus to introduce, in their proper persons, the two characters of the play.

It was drawing on toward evening. The day had been — simply another day; a wilderness of roofs in a soft-coal mist, a turbid patch of sky, and the people below moving monotonously past like cattle in a canyon. The street near by became darker with the stream of people hurrying home from store and factory; Chicago had let out. The worn-out tree was receiving back the sparrows, and every twig was a perch. I was tired of all this; there was nothing interesting about it; and so from trying to see something out of the window I turned again to look at it, for it was time for the spiders to go to work.

The corner nearest me, which had to be renovated of its dusty and damaged web, belonged to a medium-sized spider; and promptly he came forth to the work. Another corner was held — I cannot say occupied — by a set of legs on a very old web. A spider, with all his skill in taking down a web, moves away and leaves his dirt behind him. Not only this, but he has a habit, when he has his new set of legs, of leaving the old ones on the web; and there they remain, occupying the position that he last held. They do not come off him singly, but in a complete set, like a truck that has been removed from a car. And it is wonderful how long a web will withstand the weather and bear this grisly semblance of a spider with each leg set on a line. This particular set of sere and yellowish legs danced in every breeze, and seemed even more active than when they had a spider to operate them. I often wished that some enterprising spider would come along and take it all down; but none ever did. From watching to see whether this would happen, I turned my attention to the medium-sized spider as he cleared his space. Finally, he had his old web all down and disposed of; and the new one was put up with “ neatness and dispatch.”

When the web was seemingly done, the spider spent a little while on the windowframe among his guy-lines — possibly making things still more taut. There now appeared suddenly on the top of the frame, at the opposite corner of the web, a big able-bodied spider. He was much larger than the other — let us call them David and Goliath. He stopped short at the edge of the web as if pausing to look across at the owner and make up his mind. The other spider stopped work suddenly, as if looking back at him. I immediately suspected that here was a situation, and so I watched closely; there seemed to be spider-thinking going on. The big spider stepped deliberately on the web, and then, with a sudden dash, went out on it. He had no more than reached the middle when he was snapped back to where he came from, and thrown against the upper frame of the window as if he had been shot from a rubber sling — and the web was gone. In that instant, the smaller spider had cut the main cable. David’s elastic sling had not only thrown Goliath back where he belonged, but had knocked him against the frame and slapped him in the face for his impudence.

The big spider, we can only conclude, meant harm — either robbery or bodily injury — and the other spider knew it. But this does not explain what we like always to see in nature — an object in everything. What was the beneficent object? It was not a provision on the part of instinct to enable the spider to save its web from the robber, for the web was utterly sacrificed. As to the loss of property, the little spider might just as well have run away and let the big one have it. And as to the little spider saving its life, it might as well have run at once, for a spider can pursue another anywhere, even if there is no web. To me it seemed to be a pure case of “ You won’t get the best of me.” Does Nature, in her wise regard for the needs of all her creatures, make provision for the satisfaction of transcendental justice?

It looked like an original act of thought — the presence of mind of a good mechanic who understands his machine. I have often wondered, on the theory that it might have been a way of saving the smaller spider’s life, whether the big spider was injured; and if the smaller spider had simply run away and left his web, would not the other have been satisfied with it, and not bothered to pursue him ? Why this provision of instinct — if it was mere instinct?

I am sorry to say that I was not myself in a condition to look into the physical state of Goliath and see whether he was disabled. I was so taken up with the tragi-comic view, the human phase of it, that I did not even think of these other things. In fact I was so delighted over the victory that, weak as I was, and bound down as by cords made of my own tendons, I raised myself up and inwardly exclaimed — Foiled!

Spiders are interesting companions — under conditions. And the outcome of all one’s observations is finally a question — Is it God that is doing these things, or is it a spider?