Jumping Spider
Prologue.
There are estimated, by arachnoidologists, to be 60,000 species of jumping spiders, the vast majority of them not yet discovered. Although New Zealand is thought to be host to at least 150 species I have avoided specifying the location of this story. Although all the behaviours of the protagonists in this story have been observed and documented, not all of the behaviours are described in a single species.
Jumping spiders do not build webs to catch prey. Instead they stalk their prey utilising their acute vision and leap on the unsuspecting victims from several centimetres away, biting them with venom-loaded fangs.
All variations of cannibalism have been observed in jumping spiders; females may attack their mates, mothers may eat their offspring, offspring may eat their mothers, a trait labelled matriphagy.
Chapter One: in which our heroine feels the rapture(joy)? of self-determination for the first time as she approaches adulthood.
In the late afternoon, a well-built male jumping spider, crouches at the entrance of the web-wrapped tunnel he has built in the crook of a flax frond. His enormous pair of eyes stare fixedly ahead, like over-bright headlights. Reflections from the shiny “bug-eyed” lenses flash in the fading light as he scans the horizon. Although he is approaching middle age he has yet to successfully attract a partner. His abdomen glistens, swaying rhythmically and his long back legs, hoisted above his head, wave like aerials ,telegraphing his longing. He has been preparing for days, going without food, driven by chemical signals he has sensed coming from the nearby undergrowth. All his energy is devoted to impressing and gaining the trust of a young inexperienced female if she ventures from the nest in the bush to live on her own; to attract and engage her before she has the time to make other plans.
The nest is crowded with young spiders , as well as the mother who laid them as eggs and has raised them since with total devotion to their needs . The quickest and fittest of them, like restless teenagers, are preparing to head out to explore their world alone. As the daylight fades and the shadows of the setting sun stretch out, one girl spider looks out from the nest entrance. She looks just like her many sisters, except grown larger than most of them. Since the time of her first moult, she has been a leader, always amongst the first to any food available . On slow days she has even imagined eating one or two of her brothers or sisters, there were so many of them. A couple missing would go unnoticed but she would hate to be labelled greedy.. Her huge eyes , even in the late afternoon gloom, provide focussed information , hinting at a vast outside world up to a metre away.
She looks West, in the direction of the falling dusk and sets off, full of nervous anticipation. she is a proud arachnid. She knows she will not return..She is striking out ..and an exciting new path is clear in her imagination.. She is going to BE someone..
She stopped suddenly and considered coaxing one of her little sisters to come with her as emergency rations. But she caught herself and dismissed the idea. She doubted she could be that ruthless.
Chapter 2. In which our girl-hero makes at least two life-changing decisions
The young female is climbing purposefully up the flax stem, feeling strong and confident. She has not eaten since lunchtime and even as night is falling her excellent eyesight picks up the movement of the waiting male. The muscles in his last pair of legs are aching and tremulous. He has held them upright like flagpoles for hours, totally committed to seizing his chance to form a relationship. His spirits leap as he sees her startle at his presence. She freezes. The muscles in her young legs swell and she returns his stare. She can make out her own reflection in the enormous lenses of his two front eyes, but quickly refocuses on the danger that this looming presence , with its grotesque swollen belly, might pose. He smells bad. Anxiety, tightens her thorax and she understands instinctively, as countless generations of her ancestors have done, what that volatile chemical implies.. it was the stench of domination. She gags as the smell percolates through her. She resents it,but she must force herself to confront this stranger ,eye to eye.
He lets his legs relax and they droop slowly as the pressure drops and fold back into position . He no longer seems so threatening. He is sheepishly aware of the smell. It hangs over them both like a cloud. His complex gut cramps in response, and he is suddenly hungry.
He pushes the thought aside, remembering with a jolt his primary intention. The image that has driven his actions and taken his logic hostage, shines with distracting clarity.. He must be cool, urbane, put forward the best version of himself..
Lonely months of feverish early morning activity, leaf-rolling and leg-pumping, practicing stalking daddy-long-legs in the dark ..all that planning and training, had been preparation for this climactic encounter.
The young female continues to stare, as coldly as she can manage, into the twin polished globes of this stranger. The images of the outside world, (as described to her by a scaly old cobber, who had crawled into their nest looking for a place to rest,) were burning against the inside of her exoskeleton. The places he had described in the short time they had spent together, before he was shared out with the rest of the family, had planted in her the determination to explore the world outside the rolled leaf that was so far all she had known. The old cobber had hinted at a once -in- a- lifetime experience when he lived in a pre-amp and went on tour for a month. She was a modern spider. She was impatient to know what lay ahead and she saw this lumpen stranger as an obstacle to be worked around.
She had dimly imagined a version of her future, surrounded by copies of herself . Until now that was all of life as she had known it, but for now, she knew she needed to get away and she simply had not thought further than that.
She knew she must try to look calm and confident.. She cautiously released the tension in her knees, forced herself to sway gently and attempted a reassuring head nod. She scanned the information she was getting from the edges of her vision. She noticed, with a curious thrill, his shiny, strong, exposed neck.
The would-be father was feeling the first twinges of self-doubt and disappointment. He’d not been here before. He was increasingly warming to the idea of accepting the option of partial success, rather than persist with trying to persuade this exquisite young creature, who was glowering at him from enormous but unwelcoming eyes , to his view of the future. He had half-expected this outcome. He made a sudden decision- to settle for a shot at immortality through reproduction before even that became unrealistic. After all, half his life had passed without getting even this far before..It was time to cut his losses and compromise.
And, in fact, there was an option for an ambivalent parent- to-be..a “halfway” state they both were aware of. It was something unique amongst spiders; a kind of delayed, suspended development of a pregnancy..a kind of “baby bank”, a deposit now for potential replication should conditions change in favour of getting in the “family way”. It was designed for the spider who may not consider the time or place is right to be suddenly slowed down by a large family to fend for, when she was on her way to a life of adventure
The would-be father can wait no longer. He feels, with pangs of pleasure, fluid beading and then drippings from the slit in his belly. This cloudy liquid, he understands, contains his “essence.’ He quickly collects it , and rolls it in sticky wisps of silk with his pedipalps, ( the outgrowths from his face that spiders use like hands.)
As far as he could tell the young lady-spider looked unbothered.. He bet on the time being right and inched closer, nudging the neat pile he’d made, like floss-covered snowballs down to the slot in her belly where he needed to wedge them in place.. “Nature’s post-box,” -he thought..He and his boyfriends in the nest where he was born used to joke about it.
Our girl-spider looked outwardly calm, standing very still, but she was painfully tense on the inside, weighing her options. She knew she could store the sperm. What was it they said,? “Your body-your choice-right..?” Supposedly, there would always be aunts and nieces keen to help out if she did decide to keep the babies.. they were career “spinstas”, (so named because of the time they spent maintaining the walls of the nest with their own spun silk.) They weren’t cut out for raising families themselves..They otherwise spent their time cleaning the nest and feeding the spiderlings before they could fend for themselves.
But now, as she got used to the novel feeling of stretching of her abdominal skeleton, there was something else demanding her attention ,pushing all other thoughts to the back of her mind.. She realised she was really hungry.. Her mouth flooded with venom, beading at the end of her gleaming young fangs.. The poison tasted unfamiliar. It burned her throat and caused cramps somewhere in the network of her stomachs, momentarily forcing her to curl her abdomen under her and all eight of her legs to feel weak and unsupportive.
The would-be father was fatally distracted. The secreting of his legacy, his shot at immortality, had left him relaxed and willing to co-operate. He had even allowed himself a short daydream, an image of himself, with several scaled down lookalikes crawling amongst his many legs; he had a creeping feeling of a job well done .
What happened next would have shocked him if he’d had time to think, and he surely would have kicked himself for being so careless if his legs were still working properly and still felt connected to him . The girl, to whom he had so recently felt close and affectionate, had leapt on to his fleshy exposed neck and closed her fangs, surgically hacking the connecting sinews and nerves and flooding her would-be ex-lover’s body with stinging, paralysing venom. The glimmer of life faded slowly from his enormous bulging eyes, and his pedi-palms waved an aimless farewell, drooped and fell still,
Chapter 3. In which our heroine has time to think;, takes stock of her life and weighs up her options..
As she feasted on the dissolving corpse, the young spider had time to think through her options. If her ex-partner was as good as he tasted, he would have been a great father., she thought. She couldn’t deny the attraction of having a family, but she had just never pictured herself to be settling down to raise one so young. Children meant commitment, or so the spinstas used to say. There was so much she’d like to experience.
If she gives in and settles down waiting for her eggs to hatch, she’d never even have seen to the driveway. She remembered what the old spinner had talked about, before they had decided to eat him. Apparently the bush stopped suddenly less than half a day’s crawl away and there was a van parked there. The old guy had described fondly, with tremulous gestures how the floor was piled with plastic and paper food wrappers that were irresistible to beetles and even bush-cockroaches… According to him, they came out from under the carpet and from behind the ceiling lining when the van was empty, to eat the crisp fragments and biscuit crumbs.. It was the perfect place for a long weekend away, he said.
Before the sun rose the next morning she had crossed the choppy ocean of tarmac, climbed the wheel arch and squeezed into the huge, echoic floor space through a loose joint in the heater duct. Just as she’d been told, the floor was strewn with “six-leggers” picking through the grit and dead leaves for the abundant remnants of sugary detritus, and plastic wrappers. She killed and ate three, two young weevils arguing over a flake of pastry and a young cockroach . The ‘roach was an afterthought, and she immediately regretted it but she didn’t like the disrespectful way it had waved his antennae and he never should have turned his back on her.
By the time she stirred the next morning, having digested and absorbed the feast from the previous day, she had made a momentous decision. She would claim some space for herself under the car seat, She’d see some more of the countryside when they went riding in the van and, as a bonus, if she ended up keeping the pregnancy, there was an endless food supply available, just a short walk away that she could draw on even when she was slowed down and clumsy because of the eggs she was carrying.
Chapter 4.
In which the child completes her transition to womanhood..
As summer dragged on inside the van, she became a seasoned traveller. She passed the brightly lit days resting in the dark recesses under the back seat and at night wandered the interior of the vehicle, examining the newly deposited detritus on the carpet , redolent as it was with the mixed aromas of curling orange peel and sandwich crusts. Her enlarging eggsac meant she was always hungry and in the cool of the evening she could help herself to a smorgasbord of ants, fruit flies and weevils who were generally preoccupied and succumbed to her attack before they’d even sensed an approaching threat. She developed a craving for dust mites. Although tiny, they were abundant in certain places and she became expert at trapping them and tipping them over with her pedipalps, making an incision in the softer midline of the abdomen and sucking out the contents. She could then discard the empty skeleton and avoid the bitter aftertaste that came with accidentally sucking up jagged remnants of the shell.
It was occasionally intolerably hot. She worried her eggs might poach inside her. She took to riding shotgun on the rearview mirror, from which she could see the detail in the parched countryside racing by. As the weeks passed she found herself thinking more about the events of her first night as a free spider and the potential new life she still carried. As the temperatures dropped she caught herself idly checking out sheltered places she could make a home. Eventually, it was a mundane , random encounter that left her fiercely determined to devote herself to motherhood.
She had been relaxing, immobile on the driver’s seat headrest, where the last of the setting sun still warmed the fabric when she heard the three pairs of footsteps shuffling into view.
It was an older, female head-louse,. wearily dragging her feet, with no apparent goal except finding a quiet place to rest and recuperate. She was past laying eggs . Her abdomen was flaccid , deflated by her dutiful egg-laying . She had performed her duty with devotion, or at least, without complaint. She stopped abruptly, sensing the danger posed by this immobile creature with the unblinking stare. She was tired, too tired to fight for her life. She met the spider’s two main eyes with impassive resignation. The spider , with the mute demands of the tangle of new llife developing inside her, did not hesitate. She leapt forward and landed heavily on the other’s back deftly balancing the extra weight of her distended belly, She wrapped her legs around her catch, immobilized it with her front legs and slit the other’s abdomen along the centreline, scooping out the contents.The ancient viscera tasted bitter and gritty and, accustomed as she was to a plentiful diet of fresh dust-mites and juvenile weevils , she retched and spat the rest of the gelatinous, stringy material.
With a shock she realized she had killed the old louse, without a conscious decision to act, and her cavalier attitude appalled her. She blamed it on the pending arrival of other mouths to feed and realized how this imperative was increasingly driving her. She felt guilty and embarrassed, that she had inadvertently, imperceptibly, surrendered authority to this new life, the novel entity was already demanding control of her moral compass.
. She acknowledged the disgust she was feeling and silently apologized to the crumpled immobile exoskeleton. She would honour the old louse by being the best mother she could be. She would devote her life from now on to producing a healthy brood and she would teach them right from wrong and to be the best spiders they could be.
She turned her back on the shameful debacle and hurried off in search of the two spinster sisters she’d met behind the glove-box. They had shyly, and politely, offered their assistance when they first met and our spider’s condition could no longer be disguised.
Chapter 5.
In which the young mother has a transformational experience and realizes some hard truths.
It was just too easy . She rested while the eggs took shape inside her. The spinstas were increasingly excited by their impending role as nannies and nestkeepers and were attentive to her needs, even massaging her swollen legs, and deftly rolling debris to the nest entrance. As the time for discarding the egg sac to hatch drew near she accumulated more fluid in three of her legs and, with the help of the spinstas, managed to stretch out and keep them elevated, so the fluid could drain and the swelling subside.
Because she did not go wandering now, she relied on information from the spinstas. They reported that the van had been thoroughly vacuumed and was now parked in a yard, with many other vehicles. They did not initially seem worried. The carpets had been such a reliable food source, they assumed the supply would soon resume.
In due course, when the spider’s movements had become clumsy and laboured, the bulging, twitching egg sac was shrugged off and the tunnel of web that was home teemed with noisy, inquisitive spiderlings, lanky, miniaturized and comical with their outsized front eyeballs wide with wonder..
Nevertheless the young mother had been increasingly fantasising about what more adventures awaited her once this phase of her life was over. Parenting was never part of her future plans but she had resolved to see it through to the best of her ability. She owed that to the memory of the old six-legger.
She resisted getting too close to any of them, knowing their time together would be brief but she felt naturally protective of the smallest most vulnerable of the brood . One of the last to emerge from the eggsac, immediately recognizable because a shortened and deformed back leg, would never be able to jump to hunt effectively. She could not compete for food against her larger, more agile siblings and since the plentiful fields of crusts and crumbs had disappeared, and with them the legions of scavengers that nourished the spiders, there was no reliable fuel for the little cripple who took to sitting by her mother, impassively staring into her eyes, beseeching her to intervene.
Soon, there would be more sets of eyes; demanding, entitled, querulous , hungry eyes.
The young mother was becoming increasingly restless and easily startled as she warily watched the spiderlings becoming thinner and more irritable. Some of the more precocious were even attempting to pick out the weakest or most gullible, to soothe their hunger pangs.
The spinstas watched sullenly from a distance. They had been caught in a calamitous food shortage with a previous family once before and were eventually forced to flee the nest in the middle of the night. They greatly resented the efforts they had made to insert themselves into that project and they had no appetite for taking the risk for a second time of becoming the family’s appointed provider of fresh food , an exercise they would not have survived. They avoided interacting with the mother who looked tired and seemed to be drained of energy and motivation.
A short time later, the spider slipped away, in the dusk to consider the way forward. She noticed the day seemed to be passing faster and the sun was losing some of its intensity. It had been obvious to her that she had no future to look forward to. That disappeared with the abrupt loss of food supply. As much as she lamented the lost opportunity, she did not question her responsibility to the starving brood, and did not allow her resentment to divert her from what she had to do. She allowed herself a few hours of peace, watching the other vehicles on the lot appear from the gloom as the sky lightened. She was feeling calm and resigned and meditated to relax and shake the anxiety and tension from her legs.
At last she stirred and made her way, as if in a dream to the back of the nest. The little cripple heaved herself over to her and fixed her with that stare, a kind of pleading that she found so hard to resist.
Silently she reached over and guided her daughter’s head to the soft cleft in her abdominal armour. She gently pressed her daughter’s head with its opening fangs into the cleft. The cutting edge of the fang met little resistance and popped through the abdominal wall releasing a bead of tacky, clear slime that oozed from her fang and flooded the infant’s pedipalps. She smeared the liquid into her mouth and probed for more.
Maybe it was the sound, maybe there was a tell-tale smell or maybe the rest of the brood were all awake watching this remarkable act. The spinstas watched on with horror mixed with admiration as the mother became obscured by a struggling mess of legs, shrunken bodies and probing fangs as the starving spiders greedily sucked out the abdominal contents, and with them the life-force of the entity to which they owed their existence.
Epilogue
As the day warmed, the now deserted, shrunken body, with its multiple puncture wounds, some still moist and glistening when the rising sun caught them, began to move imperceptibly. The light had faded from the eyes and their was no other sign of life. However,urges were returning slowly to the warming vital pathways. If the spiinstas had not given her up for dead and bolted while the brood was consuming their mother, they would have seen the miraculous, hesitant return of some partially purposeful movement.
While she was unconscious, deliberately suppressing the pain of evisceration, and the horror at her fate, she held on to an image of a better life, a dream life where she would live without needs or the demands of others. As she gradually improved she allowed herself one driving, fixed idea. She shambled slowly and furtively towards the entrance of the nest. She did not allow herself to rest there, but crawled on in urgent short bursts until she reached the gap in the rubber door seal on the front passenger side.
She heaved her shrunken, leaking body onto the footstep and collapsed.
Perched on the top wire of the high mesh fence, a slim, tidily patterned brown bird squatted, dozing in the morning sun. He had flown non-stop from the Marquesas Islands, arriving only a few days before. Although the entire point of the journey was to find a mate, his chest and shoulders still burned with every movement and his only concern at that moment was to eat and regain his lost weight from the trip
In spite of his tiredness, he was immediately aware of the spider emerging from the door frame. He dived steeply and paused only briefly to scoop up the spider in his beak. The tangle of legs waved comically as he heaved himself back up to the top of the fence. He tipped back his head and gulped convulsively,until the mess of legs and body of the spider had disappeared .