There was a giant spider in a tree behind my house that never seemed to move. For a month I would greet him, Jeff, whenever I left or returned home. Since Jeff never seemed to move, I got to thinkin’. How do spiders work? Do they realize they are spiders and go straight to building a web to chill on, or is that only a response to hunger? After they build a web, what happens if they don’t catch anything? Do they abandon the web to find better real estate, or do they just sit there until they catch something or get caught; or starve to death?
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Jeff is big and sedentary? Sounds like Jeff is a girl. Male spiders are smaller and less likely build their own webs and eventually leave them to try and find a female to mate with. A dangerous pursuit as the females often eat them afterwards or even during.
Spiders do most of their behaviour by instinct, which is a sort of genetic hard wiring of the synapses. Instead of forming and reinforcing connections between neurons by learning, experience, and a chemical reward/punishment system they are formed embryonically in a pattern stored in the DNA. This means that spiders can build species specific webs, perform species specific mating dances and know how to hunt prey or escape predators, all without learning a thing and without ever seeing another spider do it first. That’s not to say spiders can’t learn, or that they are all the same. Spiders can learn and have their own personalities. Particularly active hunters, like jumping spiders, or social spiders.
Generally speaking spiders eat webs that don’t catch flies and relocate. They will periodically eat and rebuild nets that do work as well, to keep them effective. A decent component of a spider’s diet can be the pollen and plant matter that catches in their old webs and gets eaten along with the silk. If they build a web in a good spot they will find a safe place to hide and wait there, perfectly still, until a fly gets caught or it’s time to repair a section of the web.
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