I just listened to an Ezra Klein podcast with Adrian Tchaikovsky, which inspired me to start writing about some of my past experiences. He wrote Children of Time, about an advanced civilization built by sentient spiders.
That reminded me of the cabin in the southeast corner of Costa Rica, where I lived for four months, with no electricity or running water. I remember there were several huge, beautiful spiders I used to love to just sit and watch. It was the Trichonephila clavipes, or Golden Silk Orb-weaver. I would love watching them do their thing, especially when they were spinning up a web.
I would watch her (the big ones are females) pull the silk out with her back legs from her back end, and handing it off to her middle legs that would weave the web. Fascinating.
Then, if an unfortunate insect would fly into the web, she would pounce on it, inject it with venom, and then wrap it up and hang it on the web to enjoy at a later time.
They are beautiful creatures.