Roomie said she saw a ‘gigantic’ spider in the bathroom yesterday. I asked her how big, and she indicated something a little smaller than a dinner plate. I suspect in reality it might have been a couple of inches. I said, ‘Ah! Giant house spider.’ I had a look round and didn’t find it. At least it wasn’t on the overhead anymore, where it could have pounced on her. Since I didn’t find it, she felt it was safe to use the toilet. And that’s when and where the spider appeared! No, just kidding.
She’s not one of those people who screams when she finds a spider. Unless it’s a black widow, which she hates, and which do not live up here (IME). Since she knows I don’t like killing spiders, and take them outside (which will probably kill them, but at least they have a chance), she’ll ask me to catch them for her. I assured her that giant house spiders are said to eat hobo spiders (which I’ve never knowingly seen), so they’re good to have around.
It was probably what we call a daddy-long-legs. The weight and mass of a spider has to be very tiny. They can disappear into a crack. When I find one stuck in the tub, I help it out with a piece of paper. I don’t care where it goes after that.
While we do have large numbers of daddy long-legs in the area (mostly the spider, I’ve only seen a couple of harvestmen in the region in over seven years), I doubt it was one. I don’t think she’d give a second thought to one of those, and she’d be able to readily identify it. The only large spiders I’ve seen up here, aside from large daddy long-legs, are the giant house spiders. They normally stay low, but I’ve seen them above my head on a few occasions.
Good god. I’m never living in an area where the common name of a spider is “the *giant *house spider.” I’m sure the Seattle area is very nice. I’m never living there.
Indeed, this is why I live in Minnesota. The winter sucks, to be sure, but it keeps the size of the spiders down. We still have big ones around, but they’re not commonly found in our houses.
They’re not so bad. They’re not even particularly ‘giant’. I once had one crawl across my foot while I was brushing my teeth. He patiently waited until I finished, and I put him in the penalty jar to release later.
