Spiderwebs & Displacement

I finally released a marbled cellar spider (daddy long leg) that had been living in my window sill. I'm still overcoming my irrational fear of spiders.

When I released it hoping it could make a new home elsewhere, it felt bittersweet to remove it from its web. It landed on the pavement outside my front door and did not move, for several minutes. The thought I had was, "Did I just send this spider off to its death?"

I did some Googling on spiders. Apparently cellar spiders are very sensitive to vibrations. Their webs are not sticky—rather than the clean intricate webs of other types of spiders, they create very messy webs to catch prey. Some species take over the abandoned webs of other spiders. Many eat their own webs to reuse as material for new webs. I read that some spiders have only enough web matter within their bodies to create a few webs in their lifetime.

So, if a web is destroyed, a spider will rebuild an identical web from what remains. It relies on whatever food it has consumed for energy to build a new web—and presumably, if it does not have enough sustenance, logic follows that it will not be able to build a new web, not be able to catch prey, and will eventually starve to death.

I was thinking about how specific spiders can be with place and their webs. A web is a spider’s home base. It has strategically chosen its location based on multiple factors, such as air moisture and lighting that attracts prey. From my experience, when spiders are removed from their webs, even taken very far distances, they will often find their way back to the same place.

When I went to my window sill where the released spider had lived, its remaining web was intricately and complexly constructed, like a small kingdom. Multiple layers of webbing extended from the sill, crawling up the height of the window, and even attaching to the lace curtain hovering several inches from the glass.

I think about the writings of Sophie Strand and Donna Haraway, who speak to the importance of environment and proximity. In Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble she writes, “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.” I think about the unhoused and refugees in diaspora. The many different kinds of bodies forcibly removed from place.

A spider’s web in many ways serves as an extension of its body. It senses the world around it through the vibrations it receives. I think about the web as a technology for a spider. The body transforms the technology, and the technology transforms the body—a symbiotic relationship between self and web. Self and homeland. Some studies indicate that a spider’s web is an extension of its own psyche—so, to be forcibly removed from its anchor to place, is also to remove it from its anchor to reality.

When a body, human or non-human, is removed from its web of relations—its place, source of food, climatic conditions, offspring or other kin—it is effectively sterilized, removed from its anchor to place and reality, and all conditions that allow for its sustenance of life.