While mowing the lawn this weekend, I inadvertently plowed into not one, but two rather sizable spider webs.  While the first web I accidentally walked through was met with only a distracted annoyance, the second one gave me a moment’s trepidation that perhaps the builder of this web might have also found its way onto me.

Obviously, this momentary sense of dread was an irrational one since there are no spiders in my area that could be of any danger to me.  Nonetheless, I’m sure many of you can relate to that repulsive feeling toward spiders as this is a rather common instinctual response.

But aside from their, well, freakishly scary appearance, what is there about spiders for us be scared of? Granted, the experience of accidentally walking into those spider webs was an unpleasant one, and I’m sure many of you are like me in not exactly being thrilled about the prospects of having something crawling on your body.

Then again, I can easily imagine the situation was far worse for those spiders than it was for me.  First of all, not only did I destroy their web, causing them to lose at least an hour’s worth of work, but I also cost them valuable time they could have used to catch something in their web to eat.

And when you think about it, it’s hard not to be a little impressed by Click here to continue reading »”Looking Past the Spider’s Cover”