Halloween approaches on a witch's broom, or maybe on eight legs. Because for the much-maligned spiders among us, this is their moment in the spotlight: the creepiest part of a good Halloween display.

But I want to make the case that spiders, while scary, are also awesome.

I know this is a hard sell. As much as I love spiderwebs -- so varied, so beautiful, so mysterious -- I've been scared of spiders for as long as I've known what it is to be scared. As a child, I checked for spiders under my bed with a flashlight every night.

But I've been getting to know them a little better. For the past two years, out of a mix of curiosity and inertia, Scott and I have been taking a live-and-let-live approach to the burgeoning colony of spiders on the side porch, where their webs are strategically placed to catch flies and other insects drawn to the trash bins, as well as gnats and mosquitoes.

These spiders are pale, almost translucent and thankfully pretty small. The adults die off when the nights get cold, leaving behind numerous eggs that hatch in the spring. Having fully occupied the side porch, this summer they turned the corner to the front porch.

We're debating if it's time to set some boundaries before they breach the porch-house divide. So as is my habit, I'm doing research. It's much more fun than sweeping up the spiders.

My first question: Why am I afraid? It seems like a waste of energy.

The science is unsettled on whether fear of spiders is innate or learned. On the one hand, it's hard to find an evolutionary rationale. Of the tiny fraction of spiders that are dangerous to humans (less than one-half of 1 percent), most are native not to Africa, where human life originated, but to Australia and South America, both continents colonized by people within a time span considered too short to evolve a fear response.

But the fear starts early -- as early as the much more reasonable fear of snakes. In 2017, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany found that infants as young as 6 months showed a physical response associated with fear -- widening pupils -- in response to both spiders and snakes. Or, as the study summary puts it: "Infants reacted with increased pupillary dilation indicating arousal to spiders and snakes compared with flowers and fish. Results support the notion of an evolved preparedness for developing fear of these ancestral threats." (The experiment was conducted with images on a screen, in case, like me, you were wondering what sane parent would let scientists put spiders, snakes, flowers and fish in with the baby.)

I'm intrigued by work from researchers who theorize that it comes down to a case of mistaken identity. Levels of fear and disgust toward spiders seem to track very closely with attitudes toward scorpions, a somewhat-similar appearing class of creatures that are considerably more dangerous to us. An innate fear of scorpions might have accidentally swept spiders into its web.

Knowing that spiders aren't out to get us is obviously not enough to conclude that spiders are awesome. So consider spider silk, and the strange tale of the silk goats. Back in 2010, researchers at the University of Wyoming incorporated spider genes into goats, resulting in animals that produced spider-silk infused milk.

Why? Spider silk is stronger than steel by weight, very elastic, biocompatible and antimicrobial -- think artificial ligaments, lightweight bulletproof vests, even bulletproof "skin" for example. But it has proven difficult to get spiders to produce silk in commercial qualities. So goats -- like spiders, a misunderstood animal long associated with deviltry and witchcraft -- were brought in.

This did not, as you may have noticed, lead to a burgeoning market in spider silk products. The startup went bust, and the original transgenic silk-milk goats, Sugar and Spice, were sold to the Canada Agricultural Museum. Work continues with Sugar and Spice's descendants at the Utah State University, but a lot of the research buzz once surrounding goat milk silk is now focused on hagfish slime, which seems like a big step down from the ethereal beauty of a good web.

With so many species with so many mad skills -- spitting spiders actually project toxic silk to capture and incapacitate their prey (often other spiders), while jumping spiders have been shown to be capable of planning the most efficient route to a tasty treat of dead bugs -- the spider-verse has a lot to teach us.

I'll close with this: We all know that Superman could beat Spiderman in a fair fight, but who would you rather have a beer with?