All over the world, in plains and forest, in gardens and pastures, in homes and alleys, an oft repeated miracle takes place every summer day. This event is the construction of millions of spider’s webs.
What? Miraculous? Let us not reject the thought without examination: Let us scrutinize some of these marvelously engineered lacy filigrees of silk. Let us watch a typical spider build her web.
First, we should examine he spinning mechanism. Spiders possess from two to six or even more spinnerets on their abdomens, with each spinneret capable of producing a different type of filament. The web, for example, will contain both sticky and dry filaments. The spider-engineer will use dry filament for the “scaffolding” of her web and sticky filament to entangle her prey.
Under a microscope the sticky filament reveals its ingenious secrets: First, it is stranded, to give it tremendous stretching capacity without breaking; yet this elasticity allows it, when freed from tension, to resume its original shape. Second, the filament is found to be, actually, a hollow tube which is filled with the sticky material. Thus as the web dries out, fresh glue exudes from the core and renews the effectiveness of the coating. (“The Wonders of Instinct”, Jean Henri Fabre, Century Co., N.Y., 1918, pp. 174-175.)
Let us watch now as a typical spider creates a new web. First she climbs to a branch or twig of the proper height. Once the starting point is selected, and the breeze is right, she lets go of the twig and falls toward the ground. As she falls, she leaves a strand of silk trailing behind her. Just short of the ground her spinnerets shut off the flow, and the spider stops abruptly. Then she climbs back to the starting point, again leaving a silky filament behind her, so that when she regains her first perch there is a large loop of silk billowing in the breeze.
If our spider has chosen her location wisely, the loop, wafted by the wind, will soon make contact at some point with another twig or branch, and when it does, her baseline is established. She will traverse this baseline repeatedly, laying more strands which will become as one in a stout, though still barely visible, cable. Only at its ends will it be seen to divide, as she makes the strands fast to a variety of anchor points.
Next, she constructs her “scaffolding,” by dropping numerous vertical lines, and then horizontal and oblique cross-lines from them, until at last she can walk to any desired point on the web understructure. All of this silk is dry. The radials are drawn out next, like spokes on a wheel. Finally, comes the spiral webbing which gives the web both its beauty and its deadliness, for the webbing will trap her prey in its adhesive coils.
Our spider can expect to rebuild he web after only a day or two, for both bad weather and large insects can wreak havoc on it. When she does rebuild she, herself, will do away with all the web except the original anchor cable.
Does the spider spin only to put food on the table? Not at all. Spiders also use their web apparatus at the other critical junctures of life. For instance, the mother spider builds an elaborate silk nest for her eggs, which will keep them safe until hatching time. In some species, the male spider wraps the female with silk before mating with her, perhaps to save himself from her voracious appetite! The newly emerged young of many species use their web spinning ability to literally launch themselves on their careers: They climb as high as they are able, on a day when the sun is warm and the heated air is rising. They then spin out a long strand of silk, and when the tug of the line is sufficient, they release their hold on the branch and allow themselves to be wafted to their new home. Ballooning spiders have been encountered as high as 2,600 feet in the air!
How do the young spiders know how to do this? How do spiders learn how to spin their webs? The answer is: They do not learn it. They already know it, from birth. We label this knowledge “instinct,” thereby managing to overlook what a wondrous miracle it is. The same Creator who gave spiders the ability to spin gave them the in-born knowledge of how to use it.
This Creator, whom we call God, give to each of His creatures all that it needs to fulfill its purpose in life. And this is true also of man: of you and me. We also are endowed by our Creator with the strength, intelligence, capabilities and the potential we need to fulfill our purpose.
Unlike unreasoning nature, man cannot find his purpose in life apart from God, for so He made us. “God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27) We will find, if we seek within ourselves, that we also have an instinctive drive within us – an instinctive drive to seek out our God and find our fulfillment and our rest in Him.
(Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible translation.)