Tangled

The air itself seemed to be shimmering and vibrating. Always in favor of magic, I peered more closely to see what was going on.

The quivering was a crane fly, one of those bugs that look like giant mosquitoes but don’t actually bite or sting, whose long legs had gotten caught in the sticky strands of a spiderweb.

via Wikimedia CommonsAs the fly beat its wings with desperate speed, I waited for the spider to come scrambling out of one of the web’s anchor points to wrap it up for dinner.

The spider I’ve most often seen in this part of the park is the Cross Spider (a.k.a. the European Garden Spider, probably introduced from there). She’s a lovely creature, dramatically marked across her back, calm and focused even when a tiny tremor triggers her race across the web to wrap her prey in steely soft silk.

Cross Spider in her web

But this was no small tremble: the crane fly, low in volume but huge in spread at an inch and a half, was violently shaking the web in its effort to escape. Where was the spider?

Finally I realized that the web was torn and shredded beyond a day’s worth of meals. Like other orb spiders, the Cross Spider rebuilds her web each morning; this web’s architect had moved on, presumably to create a new one elsewhere. (Here’s a video of a Cross Spider in the process of weaving a new web on a recent morning.)

It’s hard enough to watch a creature struggle for life when you know it’ll shortly be consumed by a hungry predator, but now it looked like if the crane fly couldn’t unstick itself, it would simply die of exhaustion and starvation, unless a bird happened to swoop by and nab it. Yes, they only live 10-15 days anyway, but that means a crane-fly day spent struggling in a spiderweb is about equivalent to five years of dire imprisonment for a human. So naturally I wanted to free it, but it was too high for me to reach.

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Toward the other end of the hypsographic curve are other innocent creatures caught in tangled webs—webs indeed, like the cross spider’s, originally “practised to deceive,” to lead prey into a false belief—this time on the seafloor. These “ghost nets” trap vast numbers of victims, include those brilliant mollusks, the octopi.

Octopus vulgaris. Photo © Matthieu Sontag, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons

Octopi are intelligent, playful creatures. They have personalities and think conceptually; they can unscrew jar lids and create games with water toys andjuggle tankmates.

And they die in large numbers in the deadly fishing nets lost at sea, which continue their ghost-fishing mission long after they’re abandoned by humans. In the fishing ground of one Japanese coastal municipality alone, a study estimated that between 200,000 and 500,000 octopi die from entanglement in these invisible webs every single year. So do rockfish, cuttle fish, lobsters, and other finfish and shellfish. These nets can keep ghost-fishing for years before they disintegrate, if they ever do.

Yes, there’s good news—for instance, the Northwest Straits Initiative has put a lot of work into ghostbusting the lost nets in Puget Sound—but there’s a long way to go.

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We intelligent, playful humans are also struggling in ghost webs—for instance, of chemical sensitivity to the web of toxics woven deeply into our air, our water, our homes. As with the disused spiderweb, the chemicals were intended for other purposes, but are trapping our innocents: children and other vulnerable humans. The important work of Jennifer Lunden, Sandra Steingraber, and others in revealing this tangled web of toxicity has recently been highlighted in the New York Times, including this aptly-titled photo in a series by Thilde Jensen.

And sometimes I feel like the struggling crane fly myself, as I try to create a life of happiness and love for nature in this web of nature-denying culture I’ve been born into. How can I stay light of heart and spirit, intimate with living nature, when my feet are enmeshed in a web of car-addicted infrastructure, indoors-based education, technological communication that sucks energy from the earth, from the soul? How can I free myself from the stickiest skeins in this entangling net, those of environmental despair?

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When I went back to the spiderweb the next day, the crane fly was gone. I’m going to choose to believe that it finally freed itself and those tired wings found a place to rest and recover, to enjoy another few days of life.