A colony of social spiders grown strand by strand. The market flies into the web; the spiders carry it home, together.
“The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces.”— PROVERBS 30:28
The colony lives in one shared sheet of silk slung under a rainforest branch, with a retreat in the leaves where the matriarch sits beside the larder and the nursery. Every buy is an insect hitting the sheet. The bigger the buy, the bigger the insect: a gnat, a fly, a moth, a cricket, a grasshopper. At 10 SOL and above, a golden morpho butterfly.
The struggling insect shakes the strands. Hunters feel the vibration and run toward it, and the matriarch sends as many as its weight demands. They bite it still, wrap it, and drag it home whole along the web to the larder. The colony eats there, the nurses turn food into egg sacs, spiderlings hatch, and when the sheet gets crowded the spinners push new strands out at the edge. The market literally spins the web.
A buyback is a swarm: a cloud of gnats hits the web at once. A burn is a husk cut loose from the larder and dropped to the forest floor. When the colony grows too big, a group of females lowers itself on a dragline and leaves to start a colony of its own.
The rules as code: arachnarium.js in the docs. This colony lives in your browser. The console feeds your copy of the web only; the market feeds everyone's.
Almost every spider on Earth lives alone and eats its neighbours. A few dozen species gave that up. They share one web, hunt together, raise each other's young, and nobody is in charge of any of it. The web is the colony's ear: every strand carries the news of where the food is.
Only about two dozen of the roughly fifty thousand known spider species live together in permanent colonies. The rest are loners, and many would eat a visitor.
Anelosimus eximius, from South American rainforests, can pack thousands of spiders into a single shared web several metres across, slung between branches.
A small insect gets one or two hunters. A big one sets off strong vibrations and pulls in many more. Hunting as a group, social spiders take insects far larger than any one of them could hold.
Colonies of social spiders are strongly female. Males are few, grow up fast and mate inside the colony they were born in, so most colonies are big families.
In the African social spider Stegodyphus dumicola, adult females feed the young with regurgitated food and are finally eaten by them, including females that never laid eggs of their own.
Weight for weight, spider dragline silk is stronger than steel and far tougher, which is why a sheet of thread lighter than paper can hold a grasshopper.
Spider eyes are tuned roughly from ultraviolet to green and see near-infrared poorly. Under an infrared lamp the observer can see the colony while it behaves as if it were night. CAM 01 films AR-01 that way.
| One shared web for the whole colony | REAL |
| Hunters find prey by the vibration of the strands | REAL |
| Bigger prey draws more hunters | REAL |
| Shared egg sacs and nurses for the young | REAL |
| Groups of females leave to start new colonies | REAL |
| Prey dragged whole to one shared larder | METAPHOR |
| The matriarch drawn a hundred times life size | METAPHOR |
| The matriarch gives orders | FICTION · HERE SHE DOES |
| Burned tokens dropped as husks to the forest floor | FICTION |