The Spider & The Human

The cohabitation between humans and spiders is a unique unspoken agreement. Humans and spiders share a tacit understanding — a live-and-let-live pact.

Did you know that at any given point, you are about 2 meters away from a spider? The spider is an intriguing animal, the eight legs, the spiderweb, the patience. Sitting in the corner of your room, its fully aware of its cohabitation situation with you, the human. There is a shared understanding of the other’s predicament. The human will leave the spider alone, if the spider stays out of sight and out of mind for the human, or at least, stays out of trouble. The spider moves when you are not looking, to avoid disturbing its host. The spider doesn’t bother the human, and in return, the human doesn’t bother a spider. They exchange glances every once in a while to confirm that everything is still in order and the unspoken agreement has not been breached.

To get a better understanding of the spider, we should start with the moment of birth. For a spider, life starts as an egg in a sea of spider eggs all waiting to hatch. Each egg will produce a spider that will one day move out and start a new life as a solitary creature. The spider sets up tent in the corner of a house, under a bridge, in the nooks and crannies of an ancient tree, or inside someone’s shoes. Once settled, it whips up the most intricate web of sticky filament that will serve as a trap for wandering insect, or as a food storage system. The majority of its time is spent in a dormant state, patient, hibernating, always guarding, always watching.

The spider prefers to settle in one place for extensive periods of time. Because of that, we perceive them as characters with a continuous storyline and identity. We can be looking at the the same spider for weeks or months. The spider becomes a part of the room’s ecosystem. We might even give them a name, like Madonna in the corner of my bedroom.

This shared understanding with the human occurs despite the human’s natural predisposition to fear spiders. But imagine if spiders instead of being solitary creatures, lived in large clusters throughout their lives, like bees in a hive. Or imagine they were as physically active as a fruit fly. What would our shared understanding look like? Would there even be one? Next time you see a spider sitting in the corner, appreciate the fact that they choose to live as individual dormant creatures.