Tiny, yes - but remarkably effective, at least in some species of jumping spider: http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Sinclair%20ZX80%20spiders.pdf
These guys would make fine minions.
Maybe so. I’m not afraid of spiders, so I only kill them they’re recognizably dangerous (brown recluses are the only such I’ll see hereabouts) or when requested to by certain people.
[villain hat]
Actually they wouldn’t. They haven’t the instinct to work in groups that ants, bees, and termites have, and they’re of limited use as assassins because if the victim sees them, the fights over.
[/villain hat]
Some writer whose name I don’t remember wrote that spiders essential problem, vis a vis humans, is that because some of them are too powerful for their size (read: black widows), all of them are likely to get executed on sight, when in fact as a group they’re no more dangerous than ladybugs, and probably, on average, beneficial.
At least you are in your office. I was trapped a few days ago on the toilet.
First thing in the morning, a little groggy and barefooted, I see a very large house spider coming at me full speed. I got my feet off the floor as fast as I could.
Then the damn thing stopped, right in front of the toilet. The toilet is in a little alcove, so there was no sideways escape and I wasn’t about to put my bare feet down there with him.
After a few minutes, I maneuvered myself to a standing position on the toilet seat and jumped to safety.
When I came back with a jar, he was still sitting right in front of the toilet.
I have had a hard time using that bathroom in the mornings for the last few days.:o
Try waking up some night and finding a rat sitting on the foot on your bed. I spent the rest of the night sleeping in my car and called the exterminator the next morning and checked into a motel.
I’m not even the worst person I know about rats. I have a friend who can’t even watch the movie Ratatouille, because of the scene where the ceiling comes down and the room is full of rats.
Does anyone remember a scene in The Big Bang Theory where Penny comes out of the bathroom and says, “I’m okay about killing the big spiders, but you need to learn how to handle the little ones yourself.”
Gah! I still remember the first night we spent in our new house when I was a kid. The house had set empty for quite a while before we moved in, so there were a fair amount of spiders inside. I had to get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, and while I was in there this huge spider skittered out of the bathroom closet and stopped in the middle of the bathroom floor. It was between me and the door. I swear it was the size of my fist, but I was six at the time so who knows. I was too scared to walk past the spider, and no way was I gonna squash it. So I just stood there frozen until the cat pushed the bathroom door open and pounced on the spider. Good kitty!
paging ExTank
People have always told me this, and it simply doesn’t help. Because I’ve also been taught that cornered, scared animals are exponentially more dangerous than ones that aren’t.
A scared spider is more likely to be a bitey spider.
Oh God. A month or two my father was getting over-excited about some bug or other, and I mentioned that the only dangerous spiders in our area are black widows and brown recluses. Now whenever he sees something with more than four legs, be it house spider, blurry flying thing, or The Cricket That Ate Manhattan he freaks out over the “brown recluse!!11!!!1!!” and nothing I say can convince him it’s harmless. :smack:
Aw, man, how come I never get spiders in my office? I like spiders.
'Pedes, though, all need to die. Those things give me the creeping willies something fierce.
It’s kind of funny. I grew up in Wisconsin, and so had really no concept or contact with brown recluses until I started hanging around here and saw various Doper’s posts. I frequently say that I can’t move south of say, Iowa, because of the spiders, and my father-in-law laughed at me and said something like the spiders further south aren’t dangerous anyway. I said hell with that, they totally are, and started telling him all about brown recluses and their necrotic bites. He looked at me like I had three heads and said he’d never seen one of those. This didn’t jibe with what I’d heard here, so I started describing them to him - their general size, the prominent violin-looking shape on the back, etc.
“Oh, you mean fiddlebacks? Yeah, they’re everywhere.” Gah!
Kill them. Kill them with fire.
When I lived in northern Thailand, some of the houses had these huge friggin’ spiders that looked like they could pick up a chair and chunk it at you. They carried their eggs in a sac underneath the body, and when they moved, it looked like they’d picked up some sort of small rock. Or coconut.
My turn. First of all, I live in southern Oregon. Growing up, every time someone saw some generic brown spider it was :eek: a Brown Recluse! Now, I knew this was bullshit, Brown Recluses don’t live around here. So I would happily call bullshit whenever someone claimed to see some nasty spider and announce it was poisonous.
Karma is a bitch
Six years ago. My wife is pregnant and her and I are at home, sitting in the living room bullshiting. Shes sitting in a chair next to the couch, I’m laying on the couch, on my belly so I can see her. Mid-sentance she stops and says “you might want to get up. There’s a big spider crawling up the side of the couch”. So I got up to look.
Now, our couch was navy blue. I could see… something… very dark, not too big, crawling up the side. So I flick it off, with my finger, planning to stomp on whatever-it-was.
It lands belly side up.
It’s a fucking. BLACK. WIDOW.
I squealed a little girl scream and told my wife to GTFO. The little bastard immediately crawled back up the couch, where it met it’s demise at the hands (whatever) of a shoe.
I’ve seen a few since, but never another one in the house. (My wife found one in the mailbox once). I gag thinking I touched it, not knowing what it was.
laughs at what people are saying knowing that she has gone through the same ordeals
OMG…these spider stories. Oh dear. Some days it’s like they have a union. They say, “Ok, Union 426, you have it out for Jasmirris all day. Follow her wherever she goes. Use the communicators. Whatever it takes. We may have casualties but we must have footage!” Really, the last day of me going through the spider ordeal, I was cleaning out my parents cabin to go home and my mom came up to me, sweeping what she thought was dust or possibly a mole (why you would rub a mole off…). As soon as she did that I said, “Oh god, please say it’s not a spider!” And ran screaming to the bathroom, peeling ALL my clothing off, checking to make sure it died. Couldn’t find it. Paranoid after that.
I also have a fear spiders will crawl into my private parts when I’m sleeping if I’m not clothed. Yes, paranoia but I’ve had spiders fall into bed with me and also take showers with me. I am not taking chances!
I just caught a spider. Pics in this thread.
Johnny, I would come after you…with something. I would hurt you. You are mean. I did not click. I have seen those spiders in the house before. UGH.
I did let her go!
You know what I mean…
Johnny, you are way too cheerful when it comes to spiders.
This is probably what you recall:
“Consider the black widow spider. It’s a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.”
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)