sweasel.com

Apologies to my fellow arachnophobes for leaving this big fat girl at the top of the page.

Of course, if I wake up and find “some pig” written over my head in spiderweb, she’s going.

That’s a mighty fine looking spider…in the light. It’s only when its dark that spiders (and bugs in general) give me the willies.

I don’t mind them, because I like them much better than the bugs they eat.

I have an uninvited squirrel, grey I think. Nocturnal, runs around the kitchen half the night jumping, knocking things over. Hides behind the ‘fridge, behind the stove, in the corner of the cabinet behind the rotating shelve thing, under or in the couch. Too strong and too fast for mousetraps. Being a rodent, it will chew things. The last one was red, small enough for mouse traps to dispatch to squirrel heaven. Don’t get me started on the armies of field mice who invade at the change of season.

In completely unrelated news, no hot water in the shower. Plumber required.

Like the song Boris the Spider, its not so much when you see them as when you… don’t.

I like spiders fine, but I don’t care for them on my body or in places I have to go.

@Nina

I don’t mind them, because I like them much better than the bugs they eat.

Amen! But here in Florida we have house anoles and skinks, and they get the spiders as well.

I love the chelicerae on this little puppy –

http://imgur.com/gallery/NO8fp

Boo!

Oh why did I click? WHY!!!!

I had one living in the corner next to my chair for months. Live and let live was our agreement as well until she made an egg sac. Then chemical warfare ensued.

Miss her? What makes you think she’s going anywhere? (shudder)

So, what’s the average life span of most spiders? Assuming they don’t get squished.

Looks like you’ve got yourself a Walnut Orb Spider. Hard to tell for sure since it’s all black and whitey over here.

I have some contenders for the Death Pool.

They are Amerikans in new Zealand behaving badly …. they call themselves the Roast Busters

http://www.3news.co.nz/Roast-Buster-fired-from-job/tabid/423/articleID/320064/Default.aspx#.UniVpVO3Q9g

Yeah, Orb Weavers are prettier than other types of spiders. I know where my phobia came from, it was a combination of my brother and sister tormenting me as a child with rubber spiders, and having a huge freaking wolf spider gnaw on my knuckle one day when I was stacking firewood.

I’ve gotten over it to a large degree, but I don’t ever see myself owning a tarantula or anything, and I STILL can’t make myself watch Arachnophobia or 8-legged freaks. Especially after hearing about the cat getting eaten. Screw that. I’ll take cats over spiders any day..

My feed reader capitalized random words in your post, so I had to check in to see if you were having a stroke. Glad all is well.

Spiders. Feminism’s silver bullet.

‘I’m a proud, independent woman, laughing in the face of The Patriarchy, chipping away at The Glass Ceiling, and writing poems about my cooze, and–oh sweet Jesus, was that a spider? Someone save me!’

Um, yeah, Gibby. That would explain why three out of the four people who have expressed active distaste for spiders in this discussion were … oh, wait; they were men, weren’t they?

Spiders aren’t my phobia–but there are things that do creep me out, so I withhold my scorn from those who find spiders creepy. We all got sumpin’ we don’t like having to deal with.

I’d read somewhere that many spiders re-build their web every day (or night), after eating the tasty day-old previous structure. But it was probably on the web, and thus BS.There’s birds-nest soup – I wonder what spider-web tastes like? Probably chicken.

But that re-build activity might explain the new web-to-binbag structural element after trash day. Also, many spiders shake the sucked-dry corpses out of their web. Check behind the fridge on the floor? Naah….keep the mystery alive….

I’d have to relocate Edna to the greenhouse or something. I let a little trapdoor spider (about the size of an M&M candy) live in the sash hole of my kitchen sink window. We were fine for a long time, then one day he tried to kill me while I was washing dishes. I had to do a lot of mopping up.

So long as we are on an arachnophobia topic….

Mind your bananas!

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/04/womans-new-phobia-of-buying-bananas-is-completely-justified-and-you-might-even-look-at-your-produce-a-little-closer/

On a slightly different spider topic….

(This one never gets old)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBpQAqEXB3U

Jumping spiders are the best. They don’t build webs & they don’t steal my beer.

Most spiders live about a year, as I understand it, unless they are the really big kind like tarantulas and bird-eating.

I don’t mind most spiders. Advice from my mother, the one-time Florida farm girl: “They eat worse things; leave ’em alone.” And so I do. But my car, God help me, has a few pale ones who pop up, or scurry along the roof, from time to time. One fairly good-sized arachnid swung down in front of my face one day while I was driving (fortunately at low speed on an empty street). I finished her off fast.

On the other hand, they probably dispose of the occasional ant, so there’s that.

(Mom told me the first thing they learned when her family moved from Saskatchewan to Florida in about 1928 was to shake out their shoes in the morning. Why? Scorpions.

Also, while the orb-weavers are generally very stupid, they have poor eyesight & they only care about eating bugs, so you’re pretty safe unless you smell like a bug some morning.

& they make pretty webs, which is more than I can say for the drunk-ass house spiders around here.

I like the tiny little Wolf spiders. 3-4mm long, they can look back at you.

I recently watched a spider larger than Edna in aerial combat against a small blue-black wasp. The battle started as the spider was lowering itself from 30+ feet up an oak tree. Repeatedly, the spider halted its descent to shoot a cloud of web material at the wasp, the wasp artfully dodging each white puff aimed at it, attacking the spider all the way to the ground, where it killed the spider. A friend watching it with me caught the final minute on his cell phone video. It was an amazing look at nature and the fight for survival. The eaters and the eaten aren’t always whom one might think.

Save up to 40% on bunny arteries, vole jugulars and cat tracheas when slinking through undergrowth. Tunnel undetected towards warm nests and indulge in rich, nourishing fluids.
Call 1-800-POUNCE!! to enroll, you may be eligible for a complimentary goblet of vodakl3mons.

twolaneflash,
I was waiting to see someone and looking out a window on the top floor, the window was set back and the roof was just above it.
A lot of spiders were living there.

This day there were a bunch, I mean at least 10 or more, of wasps hunting the spiders, it was freaky.
They stalked the spiders in an around their webs, pounced and then flew off with the spiders wriggling in their grip.
It was very weird watching the predator become the prey.

I figured it was digger wasps, they inject eggs into prey so they have a tasty meal waiting when they hatch.

We get these … the grow to 6-8 cm across.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvKCEbonrCs

Built like shit house bricks.

An old East Tennessee belief/saying/superstition: If Edna is a “writin'” spider, don’t let her see your teeth. She’ll write your name in her web and you’ll die.

Can’t be too careful ya know.

I had a spider *butler*. He was a ginormous wolf spider that lived in a gap in the trim at the bottom of the front door, and would lunge out if anything triggered his web (like, say, water droplets from the hose I was watering flowers with). I am afraid the cold weather got him. Hopefully he has trained up the next generation to take over his post — because I really can’t be bothered with subduing and wrapping the Jehovah’s Witnesses in silk myself. They wriggle and complain.

I also had an indoor spider in the kitchen (he’s moved to the bathroom). We get along fine. Although he once thought a piece of shredded cheese looked *just* like a juicy bug and did a fast-rope from his web to the table below–tapped at the cheese shred with one leg dubiously–then hauled himself back up, sighing.

I recently had somhteing similar happen to me except my bed WAS actually full of spiders. I was about to go to sleep one night, when I saw a few tiny spiders on my blanket. I got up and looked at the foot of the bed and there were several dozen more. Then my eyes moved to the basket of freshly cleaned and folded laundry, and guess what…teaming with tiny spiders. I’m pretty sure an egg sac of baby spiders had just hatched ON my bed. Now usually, I hate killing spiders. I will take them outside or just leave them, but there were 100 baby spiders crawling all over my bed, and I wanted to go to sleep. So I spent the next hour and a half on a spider killing rampage with some tissues. I then spent the night on my futon in the next room, and washed my sheets and vacuumed very thoroughly in the morning. It was super traumatic.

This could still be a black widow spider. The horlaugss is on the belly, not the back but even so, I’ve seen black widows in which the horlaugss was broken or incomplete. On the back, I’ve seen various red, yellow, beige, and white markings, and even no markings at all on the back.