Spider Eyes

We went to Belize a couple springs back — Spring Break 2024, jungle half of the trip at Sleeping Giant Rainforest Lodge — and I learned something there that I cannot unlearn. It doesn’t bother me, exactly. But it has rewired how I look at my own yard at night, and I don’t think there’s any putting that back.

One of the things on offer was a night hike. You go out with a guide, headlamps on, and he walks you through the jungle pointing at things. Before we even started, he gave us the standard tourist-not-dressed-for-snakebite warning — here are the deadly snakes, here is what to do if one bites your ankle, here is why we are not putting our hands in any dark holes tonight. The usual.

We walked for a while and saw nothing. Lots of spiders. Lots of insects the size of a small drone. But no actual animals. I was at the back of the line because that’s where dads go. Everybody had filed past one particular spot when I happened to glance down and watch a snake slide off the trail.

“Hey, there’s a snake.”

The guide came back, looked, and said something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s the most dangerous snake in Belize.”

Everyone had walked past it. Including him. It was already heading the other direction by the time I flagged it, which is the only reason this story ends with all of us getting back in the van instead of in a helicopter. Anyway.

So the bigger thing. As we kept walking, the guide was slowly sweeping his flashlight across the jungle floor. At one point he stopped and said, “Look — see those little reflections? Those are spider eyes.”

I looked. There were dozens of them. Tiny pinpoints of light coming back at us out of the leaf litter.

That’s the moment I can’t unhave. Because once you know what those reflections are, you start seeing them everywhere. I got home, went outside one night, and shined a flashlight across our lawn. The lawn I have walked across barefoot for years. The lawn the kids and the dog roll around in. What I had always assumed was a shimmer of dew on the grass was not dew. It was eyes. Thousands of them. Across the whole yard. Out in the field. Under the porch.

Spider eyes, it turns out, work the same way a cat’s or a deer’s eyes do — there’s a reflective layer behind the retina that bounces light back at you. Wolf spiders especially. And there are a lot more wolf spiders out there than any of us think there are.

For the record, I like spiders. They eat the things I actually mind — mosquitoes, ticks, whatever it is making that scratching sound inside the wall. I am pro-spider.

I just did not know there were that many of them. Standing on every blade of grass. All looking back at me.

Anyway, if you’re afraid of spiders, please disregard this entire post and do not buy a flashlight.