Newly discovered spider builds spring loaded snare to catch ants

A highly regular environment can allow for extreme specialization because a system can predict and "expect" certain situations. This leads to much less energy expended, since maintaining stability requires energy that scales with the turbulence of a system.

If gravity is always down, you don't need to spend energy on organs that overcome gravity in other directions. Your circulatory system can use gravity to its advantage; that's why you can't just remain upside down, there's no effective mechanism to pump blood out of your brain.

If a car passes a street exactly every 2 minutes, you don't need to spend lots of time and energy figuring out when to cross. You know once a car crosses, you're good for 2 minutes. If you know the sun comes up around the same time every day, you can allow yourself a deep sleep during the night if you're in a safe place, or bloom only during the day.

Nature exploits such regularities in order to reduce the energy needed to maintain an organism or group, which creates specialization, whether on the scale of the group, on the scale of the individual, etc. This is hierarchical; your cells specialize, your organs specialize, you get training or education to specialize your skills, etc. For example, you might specialize as a software engineer, depending on the regularity of people willing to pay money for you to solve their problems, but AI comes around and suddenly you're out of a job.

The danger is that the more regularities you depend on, the less free energy your body needs to keep around and the less free energy you have to suddenly react and adapt to a new environment. If tomorrow, gravity started being up and not down, most of us would have a bad time. If those regularities are interdependent, as geological/biological cycles tend to be, a few bad conditions could unravel the entire ecosystem.

This is a completely automatic, unintelligent behaviour; if you remove the paralysed caterpillar at any point in the process the wasp simply goes on with its business (it will close its nest without any caterpillar inside, where the larva will die out from lack of food).

In the late 19th century, Jean-Henri Fabre studied these wasps (and many other strange insects) and had a copious correspondence with Charles Darwin on this very matter. His books are absolutely fascinating (ditto the letters Darwin and him exchanged).