SPIDERS!

I also like ants. When I was a child my mother would shout at me for feeding all the ants in the back garden sugar and water.

Is it a true spidey house mate?

The bees here are fucking huuuuge

How huge are huge bees?

although a bloke I was diving with went up on the mountain the other day and saw a spider eating a bird!! (feathered kind)

Sticky spider webs catching fly.
Poisonous spider creepy.
Insects fly in the shining webs.
Delicious spider have spotty.
Every spider make big webs.
Running around the country.
spider! spider! spider!

(Acrostic poem by Hannah aged 6: i found it when googling for a picture of a spider)

spider! spider! spider!

It's not nearly as bad as the spiders I'd find coming home from school at UCI just off campus. I'd come home and there would be a monster punk rock spider that's around 2x2 inches that had built a web right in front of my door... hoping to devour one of my roommates or I? It was a Vyvyan spider.. bright red legs, green spotted abdomen and yellow body. Freaky fucking things. They were probably just muscle garden spiders and no more harmless than anything else, but man they looked tough.

"Leaving lepidoptra - please, don't touch the display, little boy, aha cute!

Moving to the next aisle we have arachnida, the spiders, our.. finest collection. This friendly little devil is the heptothilidi, unfortunately harmless.

Next to him, the nasty licosa raptoria, his tiny fangs cause CREEPING ulcerations of the skin *laugh*.

And here..... my prize...... the Black Widow.

Isn't she lovely?.. and so deadly. Her kiss is fifteen times as poisonous as that of the rattlesnake. You see her venom is highly neurotoxic, which is to say that it attacks the central nervous system causing *intense pain*, *profuse sweating*, *difficulty in breathing*, *loss of consciousness*, *VIOLENT CONVULSIONS* and, finally.. death.

You know what I think I love the most about her is her inborn need to.... dominate, possess.

In fact, immediately after the consummation of her marriage to the.... smaller and *weaker* male of the specie she kills and eats him - *laugh* oh, she is delicious.. and I hope he was.

Such power and dignity - unhampered by sentiment. If I may put forward a slice of personal philosophy, I feel that MAN HAS RULED THIS WORLD AS A STUMBLING DIMENTED CHILD-KING LONG ENOUGH! AND AS HIS EMPIRE CRUMBLES, MY PRECIOUS BLACK WIDOW SHALL *RISE* AS HIS MOST FITTING SUCCESSOR!"

You mean crane flies get called Daddy Long Legs in Great Britain?

(xpost to Liz)

no

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4OftWZn5BU

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5485/10982956783_efbe99b049.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhTrPDUoxs

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

i thought my long-standing arachnophobia was more or less cured but the other night i found i wasn't quite there yet - spotting a quite large spider crawling over my bedsheets i had the impressive instinctive hardman reaction of SLAPPING IT TO DEATH, but the fact i pretty much leapt out of bed, dropping my laptop on the way, in the process of doing so and had an elevated heartbeat for the next five minutes was less hardmanly. as was my tentative and convoluted procedure for getting its corpse out of the room, which ended with me dropping a mug out of my second floor window.

as was my tentative and convoluted procedure for getting its corpse out of the room, which ended with me dropping a mug out of my second floor window.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rorJCGF1aM

We have this magnificent spotted orbweaver that spins a massive web in our backyard every night, gone by morning. Many nights it spans 4-6 feet at its longest point and it's extremely intricate. Always in the same spot, between our trash and recycling cans and this one tree. The other night I think I saw her creating her egg sac. I've become sort of obsessed with it and I take videos of it at night

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDu91D2DonJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

i have been enjoying your spider pics a LOT
i love insect photography

reminded me of this!! <3 ken middleham insect photography 4 lyfe <3 https://vimeo.com/358815537

Gotta keep yourself busy somehow in suburbia I guess *yawns*

whoa that’s beautiful

<3 spiders, think they’re kinda cute

ig_web_copy_link

Hehehe

Okay, I think I've been bit by a spider twice this month!

One was on my leg.. hurt, itched, and turned dark purple; the skin began to flake in a big circle and it hurt like hell. It still hurts, almost three weeks later!

Then this morning I woke up with what feels like a tetanus shot on my left shoulder, hurts like hell with a pink circle the size of a quarter. So I got home from exercise this morning and tore my bed apart and swept under there, there were some spider webs. Finally I saw a shiny black little spider crawling across the floor, not a black widow but smaller, but definitely on the move (black widows move very awkwardly when they're not in their web)... so I smashed him, hopefully this ordeal is over

12:30am, my 18yo daughter wakes me to ask for help with a "huge" spider crossing the floor of her room, reluctantly I drag myself to investigate what I expect will be an inch long house-spider as it usually is. To my terrified surprise it is a full-on 2-inch, potentially lethal funnel-web spider, which as soon as it realises I am there, rears up and extends its fangs. Certainly clears the head quickly. Rather than bash at it and risk it bolting for cover, I got a jar and managed to trap it alive. Now I have a jar of funnel web spider and no idea what to do with it.

Name it, feed it, tell it your secrets.

interesting concept but this is the first spider I have been actually afraid of!

The Australian Reptile Park accepts public donations of funnel-web spiders for our spider venom program. Learn how to catch a funnel-web and find a drop-off point near you.

(Had no idea this was a thing)

Yeah - same with snake antivenom, they milk the spiders, inject minute quantities of venom into e.g. a horse or a goat, it then makes antibodies to the venom proteins, filter off the antibodies from blood, and you can use them to bind and inactivate venom in someone who's been bitten.
Alas the Aus Reptile Park is on the mainland about 1500 miles from here so they can't take donations locally.

Ant problem in my home has gotten so bad, I'm actually letting the spiders live just so they can eat the ants. Ugh.

Oh I have an absolute killer under my bathroom sink... I'll find a little pile of dried ant carcasses, sweep them up, and just let him/her do their thing

The spiders I have are wolf spiders and I need to let them roam. The ants are EVERYWHERE, running through the walls and everything. I need my spider army to hunt them down.

(FWIW I've used ant baits in the past but they're not working anymore.)

the only ant baits I've found that work are TERRO liquid ant baits... the guy at the hardware store swore by them, and they do work very well, it's a bloodbath

Yeah the one time I had ants come in that stuff is what worked to get rid of them.

That's what I used too. Problem is, the ants come back every year, and last year, Terro was the only bait left that seemed to work. Now even that doesn't seem to work, it's like they know better to avoid the traps. I even grabbed a few and comically tried to stick them near the hole of the bait. (Pretty ridiculous getting furious at ants for merely crawling all over the trap without going into it, like they were somehow incompetent or something.)

maybe get an anteater to supplement the spiders' efforts

What's really fucked up is seeing my cat eat one of the spiders. Really wasn't expecting a live demonstration of the food chain.

A couple of years ago I heard my daughter shrieking from her bathroom. I ran in as she was running out and saw that a spider egg sack had opened on her bathroom floor. So. Many. Baby. Spiders. We are a spider loving house and we normally leave them alone, unless they are big or scary in which case I move them outside.

So for a second I'm standing there, staring at hundreds of hairy black dots moving in waves across the white tile floor, thinking... "Is this bad?" for too long. Eventually I realize that my daughter's bathroom cannot be given over to spiders and I vacuum them up and empty the canister outside.

I’ve never seen an egg sac hatch before and YouTube didn’t let me down. I can’t believe this guy literally peeled one open like a grape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2yH45fZp1E

Usually when I see a wolf spider in my home, it's a pretty big, even to a slightly horrific degree, but there's actually a tiny one that seems to be living around my stereo setup. I'm not sure how many of these baby spiders are in my home, but this one in particular is possibly the same one I'm seeing everyday because as I'm listening to a record, I'll just watch it and follow it for the entire album. I don't know why, but it's just fascinating for me to see this small area around the room encompass its entire universe. I've never seen it venture beyond the same three foot radius area, but it'll crawl up a desk, then leap to the ground, perhaps stunned, then wander away, into a dust/hair clump like it's exploring it, then walk all the way to my library and crawl up the first shelf of discs, etc. I've never seen any other spiders with it so it's pretty much in solitude the whole time. I looked into it and apparently it takes a year for them to grow into full adult size (longer than I expected) so this baby-sized one may look small for a while.

Anyway, bringing this up because I finally saw it catch and eat an ant. I don't know if spiders get better at hunting as they get older, but this one is kind of an awkward hunter. It could clearly overtake the spider if it wanted to, but it kept chasing it and then...missing it? Despite the eight eyes, I think spiders are supposed to have terrible eyesight, so maybe it had trouble tracking the ant? I saw it trail the ant for a good minute and was wondering if it was just going to blow it, but as they were moving in a squiggly pattern all over the place, eventually the ant - perhaps in a panic? - looped around and ran INTO the spider, like right where its head/jaws would be. I was too distant to make out how it was devouring the ant - I could barely make out the spider's legs from where I was sitting - but it clearly ate it. Not sure if it devoured all of it or held on to some, but eventually it crawled off another six inches towards the wall and it's just hanging out there now.

House cleaned the corners today and put some cloroxed webs in my Dunkin breakfast garbage bag and an hour later I spied mf little bro hero crawling down the outside of the bag

Went to view a flat today and noticed conkers placed in all floor corners in all rooms, I have never ever heard of this spider deterrent before.

Apparently that's an old method for repelling spiders but, like you, i'd never heard of it until recently -- it seems like something that only became popular through the internet.

Was just at a relative's who'd put a few slices of lemon on the floor here and there as a supposed deterrent. I'm sceptical but it's also funny and I will try conkers, lemons, peppermint, clove oil and whatever else if it means I can avoid having another big house bastard run down my upper leg while I was on the sofa the other week. Just got a couple of cats tho so maybe that'll help even more.

for those unaware, conkers are horse chestnuts or buckeyes in the US (i had to look it up)

yeah i wasn't sure if conkers was just a uk thing or not, thanks

I peacefully co-habitate with my spider frends... I'll save them from the shower etc.

Once in a blue moon a big hairy tarantula-looking thing will saunter across the kitchen floor but I just escort him outside with a pint glass. I can't imagine putting much effort into repelling spiders

I'm trying to work my up to fearlessly dealing with the hairy tarantula ones. I can handle (literally) spindly daddy long leg ones and smaller ones with a fat body (drawing pin size) and short legs, the big ones still terrify me though.

I get the occasional cellar spider but otherwise I think spiders here are being kept in check by the spiderpedes that frequent my building.

When i lived in Austin i once saw an actual tarantula in the parking lot at my apartment -- and i lived pretty close to downtown, ie. not out in the wilds. It freaked me out and for the next couple of weeks had me scanning the ground carefully whenever i went out to my car.

we do have tarantulas in northern california but they're not the giant things you see in the SW... more modest in size

Like ledge, I need to work up the courage to handle the big house spiders we get in the UK. I'll grab most of the little and mid-size ones, but I've somehow convinced myself that the big fuckers with hooves can give me a nip, so I've stayed clear. Plus the general horror of having it running around inside my hand, ofc.

F that, I strongly recommend the wand thing you can get that catches them in these sticky plastic fibres that don't hurt them. You just scoop them up with it and release at will.

This morning I was commanded to remove a spider from the hall. It was only about 2cm long in total, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and caught it in my hands. A pretty big deal for me. While I was waiting an age for my daughter to open the bathroom window it somehow escaped and ran down my wrist, while I was trying to contain it again it bit me! Just a tiny nip that became an itchy lump no worse than a nettle sting or mozzie bite - no way I'm going to catch one of the big ones now though!

I hope now you too can shot web

the web shooters are mechanical devices invented by peter parker. (posted from halfway up a wall)

Plus the general horror of having it running around inside my hand, ofc.

Totally! I always use a plastic cup to catch them.

Ugh, after posting this morning I found a Giant House Spider in my kitchen sink... took it outside but have felt creeped out all day. It was huge! I don't recall seeing one here before.

spider fossils... Ugh I wonder how the cavemen shooed them outta the cave

https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/images/1135/1135_blog_image.png

Imagine having your own private army of sentinels, secreted in the walls and under the floorboards, protecting you day and night from disease-bearing pests. Thank Arachne every day for the spiders.

I used to be scared of them but now I feel deep sense of gratitude towards them, knowing that they are there.

Having said that, they mustn't take the piss.

I respect the Macbeth reference *and* the catching of the spider. Well done all round.

Only vaguely related but we had a fucking massive hornet in our bathroom the other day. Managed to catch it in a glass but releasing it was just as much of a horror show. Damn.