While I was out birding on Governor’s Island, My friends and I came across this old traffic cone. It stood out to me as a sore thumb, a bright red monolith in a lawn of green grass. My curiosity led me to peek inside, and lo and behold!
There was a Common House Spider (Parasteatoda tepidariorum), sitting in its web. Although the cone struck me as an aberration within a natural micro-habitat, this spider disagreed. To it, the cone was an ideal place for it to establish a web, which dismantled the boundary between humanity and nature I had conceived. Our previous notion of Nature as separate from us leads to the abstraction of many contemporary issues in the field of ecology, which often makes the public apathetic to the environmentalist cause. But this small spider is emblematic of a different, reciprocal apathy: Nature’s apathy towards us. The spider does not pay mind to our notions of what is and isn’t natural; it simply seeks to live, to feed, to pass on its genes to offspring. The cone is simply another stage for it to act out the play of life.
Biology (ecology concentration) and Environmental studies Double Major
Wildlife Photographer
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