OK I just wanted to remind you that this is how Mom looked a few weeks ago.
Then this happened...poor Momma! Look how skinny she is now! And thus she remained for many weeks as she carefully tended and guarded her pouch of eggs for many weeks! No food perhaps only a sip of night-time dew on the grasses!
All of the sudden one sunny morning something is starting to happen!
The cottony looking brown cluster is suddenly breaking apart it seems!
Of course mom is VERY close by and is even more protective as the tiny miniatures of herself find there way out of the cottony cluster she has so carefully tended for so many weeks without a care for herself!
Just like a star going nova the cottony mass suddenly erupts outward! Hundreds of tiny spiders expand outward from this center. They are reluctant to leave and they will still rely upon their watchful mother.
She is relentless in her defence and shifts from side to side if there is a disturbance as when I brush pass the grass where she has her nest is when I am watering the garden. If she is a few inches away from the nest it only takes a mild disturbance and she is right over all her children!
It is obvious that there is no love spent upon this multitude of progeny by what most of us would consider to be just another spider to squash under-foot! Yet there is such a built in survival mechanism that often puts many of our human efforts to shame! It would be interesting to count the number of people who were killed senselessly in Iraq or Afganistan during the weeks this lowly spider carefully nurtured her nest of hundreds of children! It would also be interesting to add to that number how many persons died or were brutally mutulated while driving their cars upon our supposedly safe roads of America! I think that we are losing sight of the things that really matter. Some of us just get just a little too greedy or ambitious. We forget the things that this "lowly" spider seems to be able to hold so very intact... things that may have dissolved into the intangeable that it becomes too hard for us to understand what is happening when we observe this Lynx spider mom's dedicated activity so close to behaviour we think we totally understand in ourselves like "endearment" or "love" or even an intense sense of "caring" for her young! When we see things like this... shouldn't we be asking ourselves some very serious questions! This is not just another cute Nature episode...The nature surrounding us that touches us in our daily lives teaches us how to be true to ourselves! With all of our HIGHER learning and intellegence this she-spider somehow puts many of us to shame! I hope that I will learn something from this beautiful Green Lynx spider that will allow me to be better today than I was yesterday!!!
Interesting photo work. That is a lot of young. Like the quail they will not all survive. Our planet could never support families that size. So creation uses the many to be sustenance for others. The way it is.
ReplyDeleteYes, Mary Kay that is exactly the metaphor that I see for us humans...the planet just cannot support the human family the size it is...in spite of the strong desire for self preservation or perhaps because of it we may not only drown alone but pull down with us the helping hand! Just like this mom spider we not only have reproduced in huge numbers but we have found ways for more progeny to survive than nature can support.
ReplyDeleteYou and I know that if enough spiders can survive that you could count upon one hand from all of those hundred or so baby spiders nature will have succeeded to continue the species. As humans we have succeeded in shattering all of that...I am not standing in judgement but I only am asking the questions: Who or what do we sustain with our huge numbers of progeny? and... What do we do now?
Michael/natureguy
Correction to my comment this is how should read: "Just like the mom spider we have reproduced in huge numbers yet unlike her we have found ways for more progeny to survive than nature can support."
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