Spider vs Grasshopper

It appears that there is an epic battle unfolding right in my own back yard. Firstly, let me explain my philosophy on gardening: if it grows, it’s meant to be there, if it dies, it wasn’t. I don’t pay any attention to my garden, there’s enough shrubs and low level cover that they’ve managed to grow up enough to smother most of the nut grass the landscapers so brilliantly put in before I moved in here. So generally, my garden has reached this equilibrium where the strong plants are surviving and the weeds being shorter are dying out. There’s one odd looking purple tree that grew out of nowhere and now dominates the back yard – some people argue it’s a weed, I call it a feature. Anyway, back to the epic battle. A week or two ago I heard a rustling in the shrubbery while I was hanging out the washing. Prodding the shrub in question resulted in about 50 massive grasshoppers taking flight and then promptly resuming their feeding frenzy elsewhere in the garden. Upon investigation it turned out that pretty much every shrub and tree hid a similar infestation of grasshoppers. I mentally noted that I probably should do something to get rid of the grasshoppers before they ate my entire garden but never got around to it. So today I went out to hang out my washing and discovered significantly fewer grasshoppers. It seems the spiders have been having a feeding fest as well. More than a quarter of my garden is now covered in this massive spider web with 5 or 6 grasshoppers hanging in it. I couldn’t find any trace of the massively huge spider that must have created this web and have the strength of overpower my oversized grasshoppers. It turns out that instead of one big spider, there are 5 or 6 little spiders all working together, creating this massively interconnected web that sprawls over about 2 cubic meters (read: a large space in 3 dimensions). It appears the coalition of the 8-legged is having a devastating effect on the local grasshopper population. I love the way nature balances itself out. It saves me an awful lot of gardening effort.