Spiders

“If you wish to live and thrive,
Let the spider run alive.”
    Old Saying

(No photo) Spiderwebs shroud trees in Pakistan's Sindh Province. After a 2010 flood inundated a fifth of the country, spiders sought refuge in the branches, where their webs snared malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

"Well, you can't talk," said Charlotte. "You have your meals brought to you in a pail. And furthermore ... do you realize that if I didn't catch bugs and eat them, bugs would increase and multiply and get so numerous that they'd destroy the earth, wipe out everything?"
"Really?" said Wilbur. "I wouldn't want that to happen."
—from Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White

The Spider

His science has progressed past stone, 
His strange and dark geometries,
Impossible to flesh and bone,
Revive upon the passing breeze
The house the blundering foot destroys.
Indifferent to what is lost
He trusts the wind and yet employs
The jeweled stability of frost.
Foundations buried underfoot
Are forfeit to the mole and worm
But spiders know it and will put
Their trust in airy dreams more firm
Than  any rock and raise from dew
Frail stairs the careless wind blows through.

Loren Eiseley