Spider and bee battle offers a moral dilemma
I saw them as I went to the bin. In the web of a female garden cross spider, a worker common carder bee hung upside down. The two were plainly engaged in combat and I crouched to observe the drama more closely.
Yet there were more emotions at play in this encounter than mere curiosity. For although I admire spiders, I absolutely love bumblebees. To see this insect so enmeshed and at risk of being eaten required an effort of my will not to intervene. In his gloriously funny 1950 book The Spider, John Crompton admitted that he freed bees from webs without further ado.
It is hard not to share his instinct that these contests entail a personal moral issue. Yet if we cannot help but anthropomorphise, perhaps we should process that while the bee is a dutiful, hardworking, socially minded daughter, equally the spider is probably a loyal mother pursuing her natural trade. And just as one pollinates my beans, the other will spare our house from late-summer’s fly menace.
I must admit there was a third powerful charge at work near that bin. For, if I admire spiders, I also fear them. I may have never shown the kind of distressing paralysis that would overcome my poor arachnophobic mother, but I have known moments of delicious horror: the time a 10cm solifugid crossed the floor of a Moroccan hut towards me; the occasion a tarantula emerged in slow motion from bananas on our Amazonian canoe; then the morning a huge huntsman lazed directly over my Queensland bed.
In his excellent new book, The Animals Among Us, John Bradshaw suggests that we share the same reflexes toward venomous spiders and snakes as many of our primate relatives. Humans are genetically programmed to detect spider outlines rapidly. The system is located in the pulvinar neurons, which fire information from the retina to the fear-inducing areas of the brain called the amygdala.
It is remarkable to reflect that englobed in this startling morning moment by the waste bin is not only an invertebrate contest as old as the Cretaceous but also something of my own species’ rather shorter story on Earth.
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This article was amended on 19 September 2017 to correct the captioning of the photographs.