he was once the terror of the insect world ; the insidious mastermind , who in his beguiling craft , brought the quintessence of survival to a complex and brutal art form ; the prodigal architect and the compulsive weaver , who in his mathematical and spatial cunning , manipulated curvilinear , multidimensional grids and further employed a highly-unorthodox abundance of negative space between adhesive threads with the effect of rendering nearly invisible that which should otherwise have hung conspicuously in plain sight ; the rapidly-evolving menace , for it was only natural that his prey should adapt newer and cleverer defense mechanisms through generations of random mutation and natural selection , but this very same process was underway within the spider , too , as he must , for the sake of his own preservation , possess those traits which rendered him a more effective predator andin relation to his own predatorsan agiler and more elusive prey .