The meaning of life is silk. As the human mind can think different thoughts, so I can think different kinds of silk: call them into being with the strength of my silken mind. Silk is everything: I use it for life and I use it for death.
Monday
I look like shit. You can look into my eight eyes and say that to my face: I won’t be offended; I’m not that kind of girl. Looking like shit is just part of my cunning: there I lie on my leaf through the long hot day, looking like a dollop of bird shit. I’m as safe in my disguise as I would be in a hole 100ft deep. And when night falls, I move.
Tuesday
I first used silk as a spiderling: I was tiny, no bigger than a grown-up male. First priority: get away from my siblings. I created a few strands of silk and up I went like a balloon: landing not far away but alone at last in a small tree I call my own.
Wednesday
Every night I think another kind of silk into being and create a trapeze below the leaf I spent my day on. I’m quite an acrobat and with eight legs I’m spoiled for choice. I hang from my trapeze and there I nightly create my masterpiece: my bolas. It begins with a long – well, longish – strand of silk. “So what?”, you may ask. Ah, but it’s tipped with a silken blob of sticky goo. Woe betide any moth that comes in contact with it.
I can feel it in my exoskeleton: a strange longing for one of those cute little males
I can feel it in my exoskeleton: a strange longing for one of those cute little males
Thursday
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What a night. Half a dozen of them. Time and again I climbed up from my trapeze and waited for the next moth, bolas in my right front leg. When I heard one approach, I whirled it briefly and struck. Bam! I’m pretty damn accurate and once snagged, the moth is mine. Paralyse him with a bite: then wrap him up for later. What do I wrap it in? Silk, of course.
Friday
I don’t just wait for the moths to come by. I summon them. I push out a scent that imitates the pheromones of a female moth. To the males that means one thing: come and get it! And come they do: but instead of finding bliss, they find me. And if the scent isn’t working, I can switch to another and fool a quite separate species of moth. There I am with my bolas: the mistress of deception; the queen of accuracy; the empress of the night.
Saturday
It’s getting towards the decisive time of my life. I can feel it in my exoskeleton: a strange longing for one of those cute little males. Lord, they’re tiny: but they come swaggering out of the egg ready and able to do the great deed. I can foresee it all: our meeting, our brief honeymoon, and then the eggs. I shall lay them and then hide them in perfect little cases – made from silk, what else? My life’s work will then be done: but the silken life will continue forever.
Bolas spider (Mastophora cornigera) CV
Lifespan A few months
Eating habits Flying canapés
Hobbies Marksmanship
Sexual preferences Ah, mon petit!
Photography by Getty Images