19 September 03

Spiders in the House

There are spiders in the house. There were spiders here before I got injured dancing and carrying on; now that housework is severely limited, there are more spiders.

This is mostly fine by me, because the spiders eat the flies which sometimes get in, and the flies are awful. The spiders are overwhelmingly harvest spiders (“daddy long legs”) and when they don’t find flies to eat or moths or other creatures that appear at regular intervals, they eat each other. This is sometimes disconcerting, but I figure they have to make a living somehow.

There are a few other species of spider that live around the harvests. A wolf spider or two, a jumping spider. We tolerate these fine.

We do not, though, ever tolerate black widows in the house. Yesterday there was one perching over the door. I don’t know how it got in, but I took a well-aimed crutch to it. These spiders have the strongest, stickiest webs; the kind they try to emulate in ghost train rides at the funfair. The web was sticking to my cane, still, this morning.

Posted by at 07:50 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Yet another great reason to spend months on crutches!

    Are you still using them to walk, or only to exterminate arachnids?

    — fredf    21. September 2003, 01:22    Link
  2. We have a few black widows in our garage, where I tread with great care. But its those other spiders that baffle me, like the one I found in my neighbors tomato patch, quite big, seemed like over 1 inch or so, tarantula-like in hairiness with a wide yellow stripe going down its back. It seemed unreal….

    In our previous house, we occasionally came across the odd scorpion on rug as well.


    — maria    21. September 2003, 09:12    Link
  3. Those black widow spider webs were instrumental in developing our understanding of schizophrenia in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Turns out that benign spiders are the spinners of the regularly geometric webs, while venomous spiders spin wildly erratic webs.

    — jungster    22. September 2003, 12:53    Link
  4. I was cleaning out my closet the other day, because i just put old stuff in there since we have no attic and i saw the uglyest spider, it was about as big as a quarter and was brown with light brown spots, it was nasty lookin, but it was just as scared of me as i was of him. lol

    — kammie    12. October 2004, 11:02    Link

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