this weekend

Clearing away the cobwebs. Also:

• a poet among things
• Waiting For Godot
• comfort food
• the man with thistledown hair
• a niece and nephew

Happy weekend.

Okyeame linguist staff, 19th—early 20th century, Ghana.

wings and webs

Marthe Armitage's 'Jungle Birds' wallpaper, hand printed for Hamilton Weston.

If I ever have a house with more than two rooms where I can have wallpaper, I want this and her 'Manor House' and 'Island' patterns somewhere.

Discovered via Katy Elliott.

sunday tune: brian eno - spider and i

if at first you don't succeed

this weekend

Hanging around:

• portraits in dramatic time
• shadowplay
• a big fish
• Bastille Day on 60th Street
• new music

Happy weekend.

Odilon Redon: The Spider. 1887. Lithograph.

shrouded

Spiderweb shrouded trees in Sindh, Pakistan, December 7, 2010:

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenonemon before - but they also report that there are now less mosquitos than they would expect, given the amoungt of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitos are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

Photos by Russell Watkins/Department for International Development.

Claudette sent me the link to these ... just amazing. I love her blog - new to me and already a favorite.

listeners

Eleanor Morgan serenades spiders.

“I am staring at a spider that is a few inches away from my neck,” she writes. “Her front leg is stretched out towards me on the silk bridge that connects us and I can see her eight eyes, which look like black pinpricks, arranged in two rows above her jaws.”

With a spider silk thread tied around her throat, she connects herself to the web of a bulbous gold spider. She hums, and waits for a response. Sometimes it doesn’t respond. Even worse, sometimes it does. If it likes what it hears, the spider creeps closer.

*** 

Though Morgan’s singing isn’t bad, the spiders aren’t drawn by the sound.

Despite their six to eight eyes, most spiders can’t see very well. Instead, they rely on web vibrations to know what’s around. When a mosquito gets caught in the sticky trap and struggles to free itself, the female spider knows where it is from the vibrations. Similarly, the only way for a male to get a female’s attention is by tapping on her web.

The spiders in Morgan’s experiments can feel the vibrations coming from her voicebox. And for whatever reason, it beckons them.

“With a thread attached to the throat of a singing person on one side and the web on the other, this of course introduces vibrations into the web,” said Friedrich Barth, who researches spider neurophysiology and sensory biology at Vienna University. “Provided these have characteristics reasonably close to the patterns of biologically relevant web vibrations, the spider will localize and approach the source.”

Actually, spiders have always been drawn by human music—though rarely on purpose. Morgan cites the story of an 18th century French prisoner playing music in his cell, who looked up to find himself surrounded by an eight-legged audience; a choir at a girls’ boarding school in 19th century Kensington, England regularly lured thousands of spiders from corners and rafters with their singing. When the music ended, the spiders went home.

Sarah Fecht, writing for Scienceline.org. Full text here.

Sarah told me about Eleanor Morgan's work with spiders and their webs - fascinating.

Louise Bourgeois: Arraignée (Spider), c. 1948: I (etching with pencil additions), II (engraving)+ III (etching and engraving).

never to dream of spiders

Fabric works by Louise Bourgeois, from the show at Cheim + Read:

Untitled, 2005. Fabric. 16 x 20 3/4 inches.
Untitled, 2005. Fabric. 12 1/4 x 15 inches.
Untitled, 2005. Fabric. 9 3/8 x 11 inches.
Untitled, 2006. Fabric with ink and fabric collage. 15 1/2 x 15 5/8 inches.
Untitled, 2005. Fabric. 24 x 31 inches.

Untitled, 2005. Fabric. 16 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches.

I went to this show last month, and I've been thinking about it ever since. It was wonderful.

Post title from a poem by Audre Lorde.

Vija Celmins: 

Maybe I identify with the spider. I'm the kind of person who works on something forever and then works on the same image again the next day.

Web #1, 1999. Charcoal on paper. 44.8 x 53.4 cm
Untitled (Web 1), 2001. Mezzotint on paper. 17.5 x 19.4 cm
Untitled (Web 2), 2001. Mezzotint on paper. 17.5 x 19.4 cm
Untitled (Web 3), 2002. Aquatint with burnishing, scraping and drypoint on paper. 38 x 48.2 cm.
Untitled (Web 4), 2002. Photogravure with burnishing, scraping and drypoint on paper. 38.9 x 48.2 cm.

Web #3, 2000-2002. Oil on linen. 38.1 x 45.7 cm.

Web #8, 2004. Charcoal on paper. 51.4 x 41.3 cm.

each unique to the spider who built it

To many spiders, the web is everything.

For the approximately 15,000 species of web-building spiders, most of them nearly blind, the web is their essential window on the world: their means of communicating, capturing prey, meeting mates and protecting themselves. A web-building spider without its web is like a man marooned on an island of solid rock, totally out of touch and destined to starve to death. A fly could walk unmolested right under the nose of a webless spider.

Perhaps no one knows this better than Dr. Peter N. Witt, a physician-pharmacologist who 37 years ago was seduced into a career-long study of spiders and their silken domiciles. In 1948 a frustrated zoologist at the University of Tubingen in West Germany turned to his pharmacologist colleague for help in photographing orb-web spiders in the process of constructing their homes. The spiders normally perform this task in the dark around 5 A.M., which is not exactly ideal for movie making. The zoologist wondered if his subjects might be drugged into changing their construction time.

Young Dr. Witt had no trouble feeding the spiders sugar water spiked with various stimulants or tranquilizers ... but the movie-making zoologist was not exactly pleased with the results. The drugged spiders still built their webs in the early-morning darkness, and now the resulting webs were bizarrely abnormal, as if built by a drunk.

The zoologist abandoned the movie, but the pharmacologist was hooked. Here, he explained in a recent interview, was a reliably reproducible means of assessing the behavioral effects of drugs with mind-altering potential. Each drug seemed to produce characteristic aberrations in the spiders' webs, changes far more reliable than the behavioral effects of drugs observed in laboratory rats or human subjects.

*** 

Since the orb-web spider builds a new web each day, it was possible to do repeated tests of different drugs without having to collect and house thousands of spiders. Dr. Witt's detailed analyses revealed that while all orb-web spider webs look basically alike, each is unique to the spider who built it. In fact Dr. Witt was soon able to identify escapees by their webs. The webs also reflect genetic relationships; those built by sibling spiders are more alike than those constructed by cousins.

Jane E. Brody, writing in the 9/17/1985 NYT.

Webs made by drugged spiders photographed by Dr. Peter Witt: 1. undrugged,  2. benzedrine,  3. caffeine, 4. chloral hydrate.

Witt's photos via Neuroscience Art Gallery. More here + here.

old spiders

Old spiders weave messy webs:

In humans, we associate getting older with cobwebs of the mind; in spiders, it's the cobwebs themselves that suffer.

The web on the left was spun by a 17 day old spider; the one on the right by a 188 day old spider nearing the end of its life.

Poor spiders.

Photos: Mylene Anotaux.

to demonstrate how spiders fly

Fantastic.