But for spider silk

The spider had almost successfully captured the robber fly - the fly had been magnitude larger than the host of the web it was stuck in, and the spider had almost begun wrapping it in silk when the fly was able to free itself, fly away, leaving cut silk strings as mementos of the brief captive the spider had in its web.

Metaphorically, a sigh would express well the spider's emotions, but spiders are not physiologically capable of sighing. Resignation, or perhaps even longing, would be the words for said emotion the spider felt as she worked spinning silk lines where the fly had been caught and cut the web. As she had no capacity to sign, she stopped moving momentarily, twitching her legs as though half-expectjng the fly to still be in front of her before she began the necessity of consuming the cut silk threads, recycling rather than consuming as she would have had her prey stayed.

Not all battles would be won, and this one resulted in a rare sight, an orbweaver rebuilding in daylight, rather than waiting until nightfall. A hungry predator could catch the orbweaver's movements, but none were near. This fly was far from the first to escape the hungry predator's web - indeed, as a spiderling, even springtails sometimes fell to safety, but the orbweaver had grown since then. The asilidae, as a human would classify this fly as, would have fed her for days, days she subsisted instead on smaller flies, beetles, and one sweat bee that now shined in the sunlight, as only remnants of its exoskeleton remained. That had been multiple sun and moon exchanges ago, half a week by a human calendar. Our orbweaver was hungry again.

The sunlight gleaned off the web, a beautiful sight with no witnesses. No witnesses, that was, except another eight eyed eight legged creature on a nearby flower, enraptured in its own effort to capture prey. A jumping spider so preoccupied by tracking the ant it prepared itself to pounce upon that it unknowingly blundered into a newly spun sticky silk strand laid down by the orbweaver. The all too hungry orbweaver, who now had a prey equal in size in her web. This myrmecophagous jumping spider was about to be lunch.

The orbweaver began creeping towards her captive as the jumping spider's attempt to free itself only entangled it further, as the jumping spider's silk entangled with the existing orbweaver web. The spiders' silks were indistinguishable visibly, but felt different to the spiders, as only spiders could recognize proteins on their own silk conpared to another species'. As the orbweaver slowly, not straigthforwardly maneuvered through the web to begin wrapping the salticidae (human scientific word for a jumping spider, as jumping spider is the casual human term), she momentarily anticipated what she would feel as she sucked hemolymph from her prey's exoskeleton. The orbweaver then made her way to the jumping spider, and indeed began feeding, the salticidae's struggle ceasing as her venom began to take effect.

The ant that salticidae had been tracking had no idea how close to danger she had been. She had been tending to her aphids, who were more typically prey for pouncing predators like jumping spiders, as well as the usual predators (lady beetles, lacefly larvae, hoverfly larvae, most larvae ate aphids). She was, like the orbweaver in her own web below the ant, consuming liquid from another arthropod - in our ant's case, her aphid colony secreted honeydew, from the plants they fed upon being digested.

Violence in the ant's case was not intertwined with consumption the way it inherently was for spiders. No, instead the ant tenderly stroked the aphid's abdomen, prompting the release of the sweet secretion. A nearby ladybug larvae fed on one of the parthenogenic siblings of the aphid feeding our ant protagonist, as the ant's presence meant the ladybug larvae was located on a different leaf, a level below.

That level was parallel with the orbweaver we followed earlier. The jumping spider, in tracking the ant, had misjudged depth as gravity granted the orbweaver a second prey item upon which to snack. The orbweaver was doing just that, wrapping away what remained of the exoskeleton, salticidae now no different than Andrena as scientific names for DNA snippets that would be found if said web was somehow sampled in a human lab studying orbweaver's diets. The web would not be found in any human lab. The plant the orbweaver's web clung to was located far from anywhere human beings might decide to build a lab, as it was far from human beings altogether.

An area humanity relegated to nature, to be consumed by the flora they had led to the area as well as the electric towers they erected, a place nature existed not untouched but nevertheless neglected due to humans having no reason to intervene, to steal the land when they could both use it and have it remain usable for other organisms, that was where this web existed, where our minute drama occurred, where sun continued to shine down upon exoskeletal remains and spider silk, a beautiful sight one sparrow overhead caught. Not worth the risk of diving for the spider, the sparrow thought, landing instead in the meadow nearby, where another flash of sunlight glinting off of an exoskeleton led a beetle to its demise.

The sun shined down upon predators and prey alike, webs spun and nests created high above the webs and underground nests like the one our ant protagonist will retreat to once she had finished feeding, regurgitating the honeydew to nurse ants who will feed the larvae, unaware even within the ant colony's protected larval chamber a predatory caterpillar lurked, cloaked in pheromones that made it chemically indistinguishable to the ants from their own kin. No, danger lurked everywhere, where the sun shined and where it failed to, underfoot and between leaves and between layers of leaves, where aphids greedily sucked on what their host plant had created for itself.