Kevin Myers: It's an unlucky person who doesn't like spiders
The story of the hour is surely the appearance this week at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London of a full length golden cape made from the silk of Madagascan Golden Orb spiders. Over the course of five years, 24 she-spiders were captured at a time, and coaxed of their silk by teams of 80 silkers. The little beasts were then freed and replaced by fresh captives, and so on, in endless relays, as fresh spiders were lassoed and duly milked of their steely extrusions. In all, over a million spiders toiled to make the cape.
Technically speaking, spiders do not produce 'silk', for this only comes from silkworms, the pupa-children of the silkmoth, an insect. 'Silk' is a peculiar word, for, though similar forms exist in Old Norse, Russian, Lithuanian, and Prussian, it comes originally from the Greek, Seres, meaning 'easterner'. That's how the west commercially learnt of the orient; through the mysterious fabric arriving on the caravans in Persia. Thus the glories of trade; for Arctic musk and mink would be traded by Viking trappers in return for this precious, wondrous material, whose secret source was for so long protected by trained assassins of the ancient Chinese dynasties. Who could possibly have thought that mere insect-larvae could have woven such fabric, so delicate, so strong?
Then someone reasoned that what was good for the silkworm was good for the spider, and so its web, of steel-like strength, in due course was exploited. It is an unlucky person indeed that does not cherish the spider. No spider comes to any harm in my home. She might be shooed into some corner where she is less likely to cause hysteria amongst females, who -- my wife excepted -- are usually hostile toward arachnids; though of course, spiders themselves are for the most part female. The males of the species are sad, forlorn creatures: plaintively pleading for sex, to which the female usually surrenders only as a prelude to devouring him. Most young human males are, metaphorically at least, acquainted with this experience.
However, we do not all go meekly to our doom. The British naturalist W.S. Bristowe once spent an afternoon in 1958 courting a girl by eating spiders with her. They found that the orb web spider -- Araneus quadratus -- was the tastiest, with a pleasing nutty flavour. ("Pleasing" is a purely subjective term here; there's no evidence that the spider used the word to describe the meal, or indeed would have found the adjective "nutty" anything other than offensive). Whether this rustic snack ended in an antic sack is, alas, a story lost to zoological lore.
Spiders have been around for 300 million years, and in that time have developed into many different species. The commonest and most popular in Ireland are the money spiders, they that weave the magical substance 'gossamer', which rather entrancingly, comes from the term 'goose summer', and for which no other European language seems to have a comparable word. Billions of money-spiders are required to create the billowing gossamer of a late summer's morning, and most of these are in due course eaten by birds, insects and rodents, otherwise known as the Troika.
Some spiders even masquerade as soggy wet bird-droppings in order not to be eaten: a futile gesture when a German bond-holder is in town, for it eats everything. Other spiders mimic certain ants, even imitating their busy high-tailed waddle and sharing their nests and then eating the inhabitants, as occasion allows. Indeed, there is one unfortunate species of ant, the young of which is imitated by one particular spider, while the adult is imitated by another, accompanied by much ruthlessly furtive quasi-cannibalism -- all in all, making for a chaotic family Christmas. And yet another spider mimics the vicious Mutillid wasp, only back to front: her abdomen imitates the wasp's head, and she spends her time scaring the daylights out of everything in sight, running backwards.
But the real miracle in all this is the ingenuity of man, both he and she. Who was the scrupulous zoologist that gazed into the ants' nest and chose to count the limbs of every single inhabitant, finding that though otherwise identical, with most having six legs, a tiny few had eight? Who was the zealot that studied the wasp furiously rampaging back and forth on the tropical leaf before realising that she was in fact a spider? And who was the ancient artisan who, seeing the moth-pupa at its loom, said, 'Yes we can harvest that', and so cover a woman's breasts with shimmering cloth, to torment men the more?
We stand amazed by the products of Silicon Valley, of iThis and iThat. But the human ingenuity that most enthrals is that of the pioneers, when the spider, moth and bee were first tamed; and tensile web and malleable wax, shining silk and golden honey were coaxed from their kindly glands. These living microfactories feed themselves, mate, have babies, and make more microfactories: product without production, steel without smelting, sweetness without sugarcane, slavery without servitude, labour without toil and industry without injustice. The first, the purest and still the very best of all machines.
Irish Independent
