February 5, 2021
As I have mentioned before (or rather, complained), I’m trying to rehabilitate the house I used to live in. There’s been no tenant there for almost three months, and by sluggish degrees, with some outside help, I’ve been cleaning, de-griming, re-plumbing and painting the joint.
The original plan was to have it ready for renting by December. Hah! Try April, at the current rate. I’m still amazed at how much paint a wall needs to cover it. And how much masking tape to hold down the newspaper that catches the splashes. Day by day, I’m becoming more expert in loathing the task of house painting.
What has fascinated me, however, is the sheer quantity of spider webs in the place. The insect screens keep out most flying creatures, even if small critters can crawl in under the door or through gaps around the window-frames. But there’s no food supply in the place, so many species aren’t drawn there, and the webs have very few such captives in them. What I find, when I look closely at what I sweep off the walls each day, is dead spiders.
I’ve never seen a tarantula here, although we do get occasional black widows. The creepiest-looking octopods are orb spinners, with their long front legs, who weave big nets between trees overnight; but few of them come into the house, since they need flying victims. The apex predator in there right now is a spider with a small body and very long legs, which can skitter around the corner or drop safely to the floor when I become threatening. And I don’t think those guys bite humans.
But as I splashed paint around a doorway this afternoon, chasing some of these critters out of the path of my brush, it occurred to me that there really is little for them to eat except other spiders. Big spiders eat small ones, small ones eat tiddlers and tiddlers, I assume, eat things I can scarcely see. Or maybe another tiddler’s babies: spiders don’t discriminate much, I believe. Whatever – the ecosystem in the house is essentially arachnoid: it’s like an entire eco-system based around spiders consuming spiders. Maybe if everything else gets destroyed, spiders can take over after us.
They are annoying, of course. Painting over smaller webs can be done, but it’s easier to remove what’s there before I start. It’s just amazing to me how many little webs show up. They’re not all orderly and symmetrical, some just being small clumps of silk. Painting over living spiders is problematic, since they wriggle and mess up the look I’m aiming for. But sometimes, they refuse to run away fast enough, and they end up drenched in white paint. And I do mean ‘end up.’
I’m looking forward to being finished in a week or two. After that, webs can simply be swept from their corners with a broom or the long-handled dusters that people here sell for 40 pesos. Soon, I hope, I’ll have a new tenant who can take over spider removal activities, and I can forget about fixing the place for a year or two, until rain, fierce sunlight and a pause between occupants means I have to do this again.
It’s just a pity spiders have no cash income. If I could rent to them at a couple of pesos each per week, I reckon the population I’ve currently reducing could stabilise, and I could just count the cash. And I could forget about buying still more paint tomorrow.
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