Blog by Karen Metz
Recently, I headed to a local nursery. It was a beautiful day, and I had a list of things I needed. I also had two gift cards; life doesn’t get much better than that. Since it had been so long since I had been there, I had to go up and down each and every aisle.
I was enjoying the colors, the scents, and checking the plant labels to learn the names of plants I didn’t recognize. From a distance, I saw a dark blotch on the central disc of one of the daisies. As I approached, it seemed to be a large insect. When I got in front of it, I realized it was two creatures: an arthropod and an insect.
The arthropod, a spider, had an insect trapped in its jaws. The spider looked to be a Phidippus, one of the jumping spiders. The insect was a spotted cucumber beetle, Diabrotica undecimpunctata.
They were both completely still. I stood watching and taking pictures for some time. Then, as I finally turned away, the spider whipped the insect to the side of the flower and then made its way underneath the flower. It remained hidden there.
I don’t know if my movement made the spider want to protect his catch. Or he just may have been waiting for the venom it injected into the spotted cucumber beetle to take its full, paralyzing effect before he made his move. The spider and I went our separate ways as I enjoyed the rest of the nursery.
I was grateful to have had a window into this interaction. Whether it’s being in a nursery or working in my garden, as a hummingbird zips by, getting a chance to view the other worlds going on around us helps me to see the connections we all have. It helps to enlarge my perspective, at least momentarily, from a strictly human-centric viewpoint. Instead, I am reminded that we are a part of a much larger whole. And that is comforting.