{"id":23247,"date":"2026-08-19T17:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T23:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=23247"},"modified":"2026-08-21T17:49:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T23:49:52","slug":"tiny-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/19\/tiny-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES<\/em><\/p>\n

This summer, I had the occasion to meet a spider.<\/p>\n

She lives in-between the screen and the window above the sink. My daughter, Penelope, introduced me to her by pointing her out as evidence of one of the many spiders that live in and around the house.<\/p>\n

From our initial meeting, each visit to the sink strengthened our relationship. Like every good friendship, even as I learned more about her, my questions and curiosity grew.<\/p>\n

What I learned.<\/p>\n

During all the time that I saw her, she never moved more than eight inches, or outside of what amounted to the volume of a small watermelon.<\/p>\n

Perhaps once a week, maybe twice, she caught a wayward insect; a beetle one week, a moth the next, a series of what looked like gnats in between. These entered her space in much the same way that she got there, I imagined\u2014through the warped border of the screen that kept it from being flush and also reduced part of its usefulness as a screen (I notice this seems to be a common characteristic of many screens in old New England homes). The meals invariably came at night, no doubt drawn to the interior lights of the house. The spider hunched over these morsels doing what spiders do, which is injecting enzymes into the bodies and forming a kind of moth smoothie that they draw out of the exoskeleton.<\/p>\n

Soon after big meals, the spider spun what looked like a little gray balloon. \u201cI think they\u2019re egg sacs,\u201d I answered when Penelope asked what they were. Sure enough, several weeks later, a small plume of spiderlings exited. I counted over a hundred of them.<\/p>\n

Hatched, the babies clustered together, individually moving about, while collectively staying in the same place. The only mothering I witnessed came when the spider walked around the empty casing, methodically plucking at small pieces of it until it fell to the windowsill, leaving the other egg sacs behind.<\/p>\n

My questions spilled out like those baby spiders. Where was the male? Is there one or are their multiple males? Does the female lay a new egg sac with each new suitor? Is there any relationship between the amount of food and the number of egg sacs? What are the babies eating? How do they learn to hunt? Does the female ever sleep? Does she have any preference for what kind of insects she eats?<\/p>\n

The most intriguing question, to me, came from the accumulation of goings on\u2014the female spider and her web, the egg sacs, the visits from different kinds of insects, the birth of hundreds and hundreds of babies. How many of these are there? And I didn\u2019t just mean spiders. I mean, tiny worlds. How many of these tiny worlds are out in the bigger world?<\/p>\n

This reminded me of a story I heard about Microsoft\u2019s interviewing process, where they would ask questions to challenge a person\u2019s thinking. One of these was something like, \u201cHow many ping pong balls could fit in this room?\u201d The interviewee had to go through his or her thinking in coming up with the answer.<\/p>\n

This little world? As I said, about the size of a small watermelon, or a cantaloupe. Considering the number of screens in the house, the number of spiders also found in hedges, on the garage, in the corner next to the laundry machines, and just about everywhere else I looked (including the emergence of a spider on the windshield of our car as we sat, stock-still in traffic on the George Washington Bridge), I think there are something like sixty-four-cajillion of these little worlds.<\/p>\n

Each, unfolding and unfurling, well, everywhere. And this is just the spiders.<\/p>\n

Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 54th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and their two mini-Dachshunds. The baby members of their flock have now become adults; Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope has recently changed roosting sites to Connecticut.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES This summer, I had the occasion to meet a spider. She lives in-between the screen and the window above the sink. My daughter, Penelope, introduced me to her by pointing her out as evidence of one of the many spiders that live in and around the house. From our initial meeting, each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":479,"featured_media":23249,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-commentary","category-science-place"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/479"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23250,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23247\/revisions\/23250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}