The Proverbial Circle of Life

Today, while sitting at the dining room table eating fish sticks, Cathleen and I watched our spider friend (Charlotte Juliet Antonia Spider) devour a wasp that was laying in the windowsill. She came down the wall and headed very quickly towards the sill, but as soon as she got within a couple of inches of the wasp, she stopped and was very cautious. The wasp was actually already dead, he probably knocked himself out while trying to fly through the double-pane glass, but our little girl was as careful as ever. She moved each leg slowly, watching for any sort of reaction from the wasp, making sure that she could get within striking distance without startling him. It's hard to remember, but it probably took her at least five minutes to travel an inch, always stalking her already dead prey. We think she was showing off for us, showing us just how stealthy she could be. When she had just an inch left to go, she stopped again and waited for another several minutes. I am not quite sure how she would ever kill a living thing if she was this hesitant about a dead thing, but she seems to be doing just fine. Just when I was starting to lose interest, she pounced. She took that last inch in one lightning fast leap, with fangs out and ready to sink them into the wasp's abdomen. After such caution, that last action was the most violent, grotesque, horrible, beautiful thing that I have ever seen. We get so disconnected from that brutal magnificence, sometimes it's nice to have it sneak into our kitchen.

I think I remember from junior high science classes that spiders have a poison in their fangs that liquefies the insides of their prey. I don't know how long this takes, but Charlotte Juliet Antonia sat there with her kill for a very long time. She started out on top of it, then slowly worked her way down, finally lifting the wasp up above her head to suck out every last, juicy drop of its innards. I kept an eye on her for at least 45 minutes, and she was there sucking the whole time. When I went back hours later, she was gone and only a shriveled wasp exoskeleton remained.