Niche

Today's pointless photo isn't exactly pointless (oh no... pumpkin time...) and it isn't exactly new. I took this one a few years ago, and it's one of the coolest spider pictures I've ever been lucky enough to take. It's also the one I'm currently using as my Blogger profile photo, if it looks familiar.

What we've got here is a Goldenrod Spider defending her egg sac. She laid her eggs on that chokecherry leaf and then wrapped it up protectively with silk, giving it that triangular shape. She would have guarded the sac until she died, giving the spiderlings as good a chance as possible to survive early predation.

Lots of them would have been eaten anyway, but that's the way nature works.

Spiders have been on my mind a bit (well, a bit more than usual. My two fans already know that I have a thing for spiders) because of my doodle for this week's Illustration Friday word. The word was scary, and if you're so inclined you can find my take on the other blog. You'll probably notice, though, that spider = scary wasn't something that I really had my heart in.

Listen, I know that spiders are scary for a lot of people. I get that. I find them beautiful, but if you've already made up your mind that they're scary then my finding beauty in them isn't going to do a thing for you except convince you even further that I'm weird. Whatever. It doesn't matter.

What does matter, though, is the people who seem to equate scary with needing to be destroyed.  There are plenty of them out there, sadly. Spiders and bugs scare me -- squish them! Snakes scare me -- call the exterminator! That's the kind of thinking that makes me more than a little depressed, to be honest.

You see, all of those scary things have their niches. Their usefulnesses. Their places where they belong in the system. Without them we run into a whole boatload of trouble.

Example? Well, imagine a world without spiders. You'd better start liking insects a whole bunch, because there's going to be a massive amount more of them. So let's just get rid of the insects? Ok, then. Do you like bluebirds? Or chickadees? Or woodpeckers? All insect-eaters, and you've in effect got rid of them too.

It sounds trite to say, I know, but everything's connected. Everything has a job, as I sometimes put it to my students at the nature centre. If one thing doesn't do its job, it makes it hard for the next thing to do its job, and so on and so on and so on. The tricky part for us is that even though we're also part of the system we like to believe that we're not. That wouldn't matter so much, except that we've given ourselves an awful lot of power over systems that maybe we'd be better off leaving to themselves. We decide that one job -- say, eating bugs -- isn't really all that important, so we remove (either inadvertently or on purpose. Both happen) the "pest" that's eating bugs. Then, when we're overrun with bugs, we bring in a new predator to try to create a new balance. And when that new balance turns out to mean that the new predator doesn't have any predators of its own and happily creates its own overrun?

Incidentally, I'm not really of the school that thinks that Seven-spot Ladybirds are evil. It's just that we don't know the full extent of what their introduction has done to the North American ladybird population.

For something much more sinister that was caused by human intervention, however, may I present the Cane Toad?

I don't want to go on a full-scale interpreter rant here, so I'm going to cut this short. Or, erm, at least a lot shorter than it could easily have been. Let me just end by saying that if you're scared of something, fine. Be scared of it. Whomever knows that there are plenty of things out there that I'm scared of. Just don't assume that scary means lacking value or importance, and that scary things should all go away. Sometimes it's even scarier to find out what we're left with after the scary things are gone...