Tiny life and death struggles

Such tiny struggles are going on in the natural world all around us all of the time. This little link in the food web caught my eye while out for a lunchtime walk around the business park pond. Ecologists tend to see the world around them in terms of the eaters and the eaten! A tiny spider had made its web inside the cup of a marsh marigold flower and had caught a fly. I think the spider might be the orb spider Arianella cucurbitina, a species I blipped about last year. In that case, it had made a web on a Lily flower in my garden. Making a web inside a flower that is attracting insects is a pretty shrewd strategy!