WORLD WIDE WEB

A spider web, like the one on the bush outside my house upstate, is a good place to consider humility.

Like most designers, I like to think of design as a very human activity, one that truly separates us from the rest of dumb life.  But if you wander in the wilderness, you quickly see the kink in this line of thinking.  There are beavers that make sustainable dams, termites
that build air-conditioned skyscrapers, and even the lowly rat mole designs a tunnel with waste disposal.

True, none of these designing species have yet come up with a cell phone, but perhaps that is only because they know how annoying it would be.

One of the most stunning examples of non-human architecture – not counting the universe itself of course – has to be the spider web.  Spiders and their webs have been around for 100 million years, which is about 100 times as long as homo sapiens with our own Web.  Sure the online revolution is great, but try catching dinner with it.

Most of the 40,000 known species of spiders make webs and we tend to think of them all as looking
the same.  Like that iconic spiral that comes instantly to mind.  There are, in fact, thousands of different spider web designs – or so the spider folks say – and scores of them are used by any individual species to fit the need at hand.   Some spiders spin only single thread traps like clotheslines; others produce webs like lassos that swish through the air; there are even spiders that spin underwater nets to catch tiny fish.  Funnel-shaped webs, rigid webs, sheet webs that billow like sails, the list goes on and on all the way up to the familiar labyrinthine web of our nightmares. 

To make a web, a spider’s glands distribute liquid silk to three pairs of spinnerets.  These work like microscopic fingers pulling, carding, twisting, and weaving the thread as it solidifies in the air.  The thread itself is astounding: barely a millionth of an inch in diameter yet stronger than steel of the same thickness.  Not to mention that it is instantly available, sticky, stretchy, and flexible.  Talk about a useful material!

It takes about 25 minutes for a spider to weave one of those classic webs, longer if local conditions are difficult.  It starts with a single dry thread called a dragline (by us, not them) that the spider uses as a
basic orientation thread since most spiders have lousy vision and have to go by touch.  The first line of
the web itself is called a bridge line and this is followed by two more lines to create a triangle.  The spider then selects a center point and starts to spin the radials, the spokes of the design.  When this is secure, it creates the orbital pattern of rungs until the web is complete.  Spiders continue to manage and repair the web throughout its use.

Watching the spider up close is like observing the design process in action.  Focus, work, adjustment, decision, more work…it is all there.  Purists will refute this equation and point out that the spider is no designer at all, only a biologic machine spinning out a programmed pattern.  They will say that the design of the web is in the genes, that there is no choice, and therefore what spiders do is no example of
design at all, just DNA raveling and unraveling.  And of course they might be right.  But then, that explanation might just as well fit us as we go about our business.

Sitting there watching that web, I prefer to think that my little spider and I have something different in common…a sense that the world can be adapted to suit our needs, that the universe is improvable, and that we are just the ones to do it.