In Defense of Spiders
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times. Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 13,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today. Kasey Butcher Santana | Longreads | April 8, 2025 | 3,034 words (11 minutes)A young man selling pesticides knocks on the door when I’m writing. I try to ignore him, but he will not leave. When I open the door, he wants to know what I do about spiders. I wonder if I should tell him that I name them. Would that make him go away? Instead, I mention my bees and he responds that his company doesn’t spray for pollinators. Just wasps. And spiders. Upstairs, a spider is squatting in our shower. Thomisidae—a crab spider. I named her Deb and have greeted her each morning for a week, trying not to splash her. I am startled when I see her on the tile wall, but she also seems scared of me.I do not tell this salesman about Deb. Or that wasps are pollinators. He has been aggressive in his approach, prepared to argue. He opens his mouth to make another pitch and closes it again when he notices my impassive stance. He shrugs and sulks away, like a bully deciding I am not worth his time. I have recurring nightmares of spiders rappelling down from the ceiling. Their impossible size tells me that I am dreaming, but not before I fling myself from the bed. By the time I fully regain consciousness, I am standing, reaching for the lamp. In my 20s, the giant spiders returned often enough that I consulted a dream dictionary, hoping to uncover some woo-woo secret of the unconscious mind. Spiders are considered symbols of creativity or good omens, even messengers in some Indigenous traditions. It seemed most likely that my dreams related to stress.With repeated exposure, my attitude toward the spiders softened. They still visit, but as the novelty of the dreams wore off, so did the terror. I still leap out of bed, barely waking to check for real spiders before crawling back to sleep. I sometimes wonder if they do have a message for me—my shadow self communicating through a web I cannot see in the dark.The spiders first appeared when I was in high school, following me from my childhood bedroom to dorm rooms, through various apartments, to my current home. Whenever I start to feel stifled by pressure to be not just good, but perfect, shrinking quieter and smaller until it feels like my blood has been drained, the spiders wake me up. As my pulse slows again, I wonder if my dreaming mind has projected the idea of a web onto the ceiling, the spiders connecting neurons, thoughts, and fears as my brain makes sense of them overnight. In the morning, I feel that the dream was a call from some tangled part of my subconscious that demands my care. The spiders tend to a web spun from shyness, reservations, and anxiety.Although my bees are a good excuse to send pesticide solicitors away, I am not only concerned for them. Their hive was the gateway to getting curious about other bugs I encounter. I learned about the native bees who visit the garden. Plump bumblebees and tiny green metallic bees. Leaf-cutter bees twerking to gather pollen and camouflaged crab spiders hoping to catch them.I sometimes wonder if they do have a message for me—my shadow self communicating through a web I cannot see in the dark.I found a wasp dead on the ground outside the beehives. Her large body was shimmering metallic red with large indigo wings. Tachypompilus ferrugineus—a rusty spider wasp. The species is harmless to humans but lethal for arachnids. A female rusty spider wasp catches a spider, often one many times her size, and paralyzes it with her sting. Using unbelievable strength, she drags the spider back to her burrow and lays eggs in its abdomen. The spider serves as a meal for hatching larvae who slowly kill it while it lays, immobile but conscious, in the wasp’s nest. I imagine a wolf spider dying of this nightmarish treatment and the spiders of my own dreams are almost welcome by comparison. My husband sealed a large crack between our patio and the house’s foundation and I watched a rusty spider wasp frantically search for a gap in the foam. He had unintentionally closed her nest. I felt a pang of pity while my own offspring crawled on the ground at my feet. A few weeks later, I looked up from my desk and saw a rusty spider wasp perched on my files. I wondered if she had broken into my den, ready to exact revenge. I watched as she cleaned her long antennae, articulating her large head side to side, like a friend who had come to chat. I looked her in her deep red eyes, picked up the stack of folders, and walked her to the door.On the bus, a kid from another class was teased for his glasses, his father’s vasectomy, any small thing the bullies latched onto. The bullies were also his friends. I was on the edge of the group, just hoping to get home unnoticed to watch TRL and work on my zine. They knocked him into the gap between two seats. As one of his friends reached to steal his glasses, I thought I should help him up. I try to remember what I did, but I think I did nothing. The memory of that inaction and fear, that failure of kindness, tugs at my skin like a concealed thread, pulling me back to that moment of shame. Like a spider who freezes when it senses it has been spotted, I just wanted to be invisible. My mother advised me to make eye contact or people would think I was lying. I learned to perform friendliness even when I felt shy, but I was more comfortable alone. I grew suspicious of scripted reactions. A forced laugh. An affected recoiling. Reminders to smile. I worried that I looked insincere, that the hollowness of these performances would echo on the days when, despite wanting connection, my social reserves ran empty. The next year, I no longer rode the bus, but, like penance for my inaction, I did not have any friends in my lunch period. I sat in a corner of the hallway with the goth kids, eating a sandwich and reading a book. They were nicer to me than some of my friends were. There was an instructive and healing quality to how much easier it was to be with them—alone together—than in the noise of the cafeteria. These two memories, those bus rides and lunches, follow each other in my subconscious, connected by the silk of my dreams, woven into the person I grew into and the home I made, where we do not kill spiders or pretend to be afraid of them. I could have shared my uncomfortable seat, space for riding in peace for a few minutes, offering breathing room for that other kid. But instead, I conformed to the cruelty and remained silent. I was a year older than his group of popular kids. By interfering, I would have risked little. Possibly, my offer of help would have been rebuffed or backfired. I cannot know now, but I learned then how bad it felt to repress the impulse to reach out, to speak up, to protect.The goth kids shared that breathing room with me. They more than just left me alone. They welcomed me in my floral blazer and ballet flats, reading Dostoyevsky. They left me be, but without indifference. “Live and let live,” some say when they catch a spider to release it outside unsquished. It does not feel like enough. So I acknowledge the spiders and their right to live and eat and create. I name them.I placed a hive box on a small wooden table that I keep in the garden and the bees had an unusually big reaction. I stepped aside and watched, trying to understand what their movements communicated. They clung to the box, festooning, climbing over each other to get inside. I saw a bee between the thick table legs, floating motionlessly, as if gravity had let her go. “Spider!” my subconscious screamed in the high-pitched voice of a thousand bees. I moved the hive box, brushing bees away so I could flip the table on its side. A large orb-weaver ran for a dark corner. Araneus gemmoides—a cat-faced spider. Her web attached to the four corners of the table, covering the underside. I freed my bees and while they cleaned sticky silk off each other, I moved the spider across the yard to a shaded, tree-lined spot. I respected the genius of where she built her web, but she could not stay to prey on the colony.From left: a jumping spider (Phidippus audax), a cat-faced spider (Araneus gemmoides), a crab spider (Thomisidae), and a golden orb-weaver (Trichonephila edulis). All photos courtesy of Kasey Butcher Santana. That autumn, I spotted a spiderweb illuminated by the garage light, contrasted against the dark sky. At its center was a bulbous spider with two distinct ridges on her abdomen, like little peaks, or cat ears. Cat-faced spiders commonly use light and shadow to hunt, for example building a web under a garage lamp, trusting that the light will lure insects. The spider retreats to a dark corner, waiting for prey to tangle in her trap, the gossamer spirals dotted by many small flies. In the morning, the spider blended into the wood trim of the garage. I named her Daphne.I popped open the beehive lid and found a spider looking at me with two big eyes, which appeared blue as they reflected the turquoise of her chelicerae. Phidippus audax—a bold jumping spider. Four white spots decorated her large black body. She held an earwig. I was tempted to let her stay to eat them, but a spider in the beehive seemed like a bad idea. I scooped her up with my hive tool and moved her to the shady spot I had chosen for the cat-faced spider. I finished inspecting that hive and moved to the second. A jumping spider clung to the lid. Was this the same spider? Had she jumped the 20 feet from where I left her? I tried to catch her, but she darted away, hiding in the hive’s handle, as if I could not see her there, watching me.The next time I opened the beehive, she was inside the lid with evidence of how busy she had been. Through the silk she wrapped around her nest, I could see the faint outlines of a cluster of babies. The spider ran to hide and I looked at her offspring, considering what I should do. I set the cover to the side and finished my work. This beehive was strong. The spider did not seem to be doing them any harm. She might even reduce the number of other bugs taking refuge under the lid. I knelt down and watched the spider where she hid, clutching another earwig. I could not bring myself to scrape her babies away, so I left them and named her Dot. Eventually, she and her young moved on, leaving only wisps of silk and a healthy beehive.Spiders sometimes eat their silk, a fibrous protein made from chains of amino acids produced by glands in the spider’s abdomen. Most spiders have two or three pairs of spinnerets which they use to twist several fine threads together. In some cases, a spider’s silk is five times stronger than steel of the same thickness. Researchers use the silk of golden orb-web spiders—Trichonephila edulis—in medical studies to help guide the regrowth of damaged nerves. Given how much energy it takes to spin silk, it makes sense to devour a web or a funnel, recycling those precious calories before moving on.The Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Mythology interprets the myth of Arachne as a statement about poetry and censorship under authoritarianism. Ovid was exiled by the emperor Augustus and may have been commenting on the act of writing poetry under the rule of a tyrant. He depicts Arachne as a young woman with exemplary weaving skills. When Arachne boasts that she is a better weaver than the goddess Athena, Athena challenges her to a contest. Athena’s tapestry depicts the punishment of mythological figures who disputed the authority of the Olympian gods, whereas Arachne depicted the unjust behavior of the gods toward mortals. When Arachne wins the duel and refuses to attribute her skill to Athena’s favor, the goddess is enraged. Perhaps lacking a sense of irony or any self-awareness, Athena destroys the girl’s tapestry and turns Arachne into a spider, cursing her and all her descendants to spin webs forever. Reading this story, I consider the spiders weaving in my dreams at times when I feel most stressed about writing. I wonder if they warn against self-censorship. Before I can get too far down this line of thinking, I remember the cobwebs I have cleaned out of corners and light fixtures. General consensus says that a cobweb is a spider’s web that is no longer in use and has started to collect dust. I dwell on that image, wondering about the weaver and where she disappeared to, abandoning her work. I wonder if I have, in haste, wiped away a tapestry still in use or under construction, a censor, a bully, operating under the tyranny of tidiness. A spider’s web, after all, is not dirty, just sometimes unwelcome. I fear I have sometimes cared too much what others would think of my housekeeping if I allowed a web to stay. That I would be considered unclean or strange. I consider the common house spider—Parasteatoda tepidariorum—and how many soil gnats she caught in a sunny kitchen window. “Earning her keep,” my husband remarked as we watched her shuffle across the glass. Maybe we are strange, but we would have let her live there, a helper to the houseplants. She moved on before I could give her a name. I wonder if I have, in haste, wiped away a tapestry still in use or under construction, a censor, a bully, operating under the tyranny of tidiness.As they spin their webs, spiders are methodical, first drafting the basic outline, then going back over it with the stickier silk that will snare a cricket or fly. Viewing the spider’s web as an act of authorship veers toward anthropomorphism, but if the spider is unaware of the creativity in her work, it does not make it less valuable to her. She tends to the structure, repairing damage, devoting energy to producing both the silk and the pattern for her web. In turn, the web feeds her. Many spiders weave a new trap each day, coming back to create again and again. Some interpret the Arachne myth as depicting how, from the margins, women have used textiles and other arts to express themselves personally and politically but the association between women and spiders is used both as a tribute to artistry and a pejorative reference to cunning. For their part, many species of spiders exhibit sexual dimorphism—meaning the females are often much bigger than the males, and their webs more impressive. Feminist philosophy and ecology sometimes use arachnid imagery to depict a web of life, connecting all beings. The spider’s web is both delicate and strong, and its stickiness puts up resistance to being wiped away. Silk clings to dusters and doorframes, like an afterthought or a dream that’s hard to shake.When the spiders arrive in my dream, are they jolting me to risk vulnerability personally or creatively? I could stay inside collecting dust, or I could weave my web where others can see. If rejected, could I have the temerity to take the silk back, gobbling up my own words and trying again in some other corner? Behind a bale of hay, a grass spider—Agelenopsis—built a funnel web. I exhale sharply, realizing how narrowly I missed sticking my hand in her trap. Our alpacas watch me, unimpressed. I hope the spider catches more of the flies that plague the barn during this hot stretch of weather. Later, my daughter jumps up and down when I tell her we are going to a Spiders Around the World exhibit at the local Butterfly Pavilion. Confidently, she places her hand out to hold a tarantula named Rosie. I marvel at her fearlessness and think about how casually she pointed out a new cat-faced spider building her web on the underside of the porch. We watched as a windstorm buffeted her around. “She will be okay,” I whispered, “She has her web.” But I was unsure of it, and then she was gone. As we observe the enormous spiders in the exhibit, free to move close to them, it is easy to miss how vulnerable they are. Their long legs, often covered in tufts of hair, are the stuff of many people’s nightmares, but spiders are shy, happily living in corners, looking for lunch. Spiders consume more prey than all other carnivores, but unlike a lion, a spider first anesthetizes its meal. The breadth of their consumption comes not from ferocity but from how many spiders there are and how many insects they collectively eat. There’s a common saying that we are never more than three feet from a spider, but because their soft bodies and spindly legs are easily wounded, spiders prefer to hide. Furthermore, most venomous species rarely bite humans, doing so only if provoked or startled. Many of them have fangs too small to puncture human skin. I worry a lot more about the rattlesnakes and mountain lions who also live nearby.Perhaps the spiders’ quietness draws me to them when I have the chance to see them work. My daughter and I watch a spider delicately connecting two threads of silk. Trichonephila clavipes—a golden silk spider. As her little finger reaches to point at it, I steady her hand, stopping short of disturbing the web, protective instinct overtaking wonder. The two of us, and maybe the spider, are caught in the tension between curiosity and repulsion.That night, when a wolf spider—Lycosidae—freezes halfway across the carpet, I remember the young man selling pesticides. I told him that we do not treat for spiders and I think they overheard me and took it as an invitation. They come and go with the seasons, hiding badly behind bookcases or catching gnats on window screens. It’s okay, I think. They mean us no harm. When we do not move, the wolf spider runs under the piano. “That’s Doug,” I tell my husband. Kasey Butcher Santana is a writer and caretaker of a small alpaca farm. She earned a Ph.D. in American literature and has worked as an English teacher and a jail librarian. Her work focuses on these experiences, nature, empathy, and curiosity. Recently, her writing appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Write or Die Magazine, and Pithead Chapel. You can find her at Life Among the Alpacas.Editor: Krista StevensCopyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands