Rather odd, mrAru has a rather huge crater in the back of his leg from a brown recluse bite that was diagnosed by taking the recently deceased spider to the hospital with him. it was living under the seat of his [rather aptly named] VW bug, in Fresno CA. I have personally seen and live captured a brown recluse at a friends grape ranch just outside Fresno when visiting [along with the hugest wolf spider I have ever seen, it was about half the size of my old pet tarantula]
OK Im wierd, and not overly girly, I happen to like spiders snakes and lizards. I think they are way spiffy critters.
Moving out of my previous house, we found two Black Widows. I seriously considered just torching the place and buying all new stuff.
I know, intellectually, that spiders are our friends, and if we get bitten, it’s only because we carelessly intruded upon their space and they were merely defending themselves.
Emotionally, I know that spiders want to kill and eat me.
My name is elucidator, and I am an arachnophobe…(Hi, 'luc!..)
Your husband screams like a girl when surprised by a spider? If only I retained that much dignity, that would be great. I’m as manly macho as the next guy, if the next guy is an Art History major who shops. And I really lke effeminate women.
But say “Honey, there is a big boogety hairy spider in the bathroom, and I want you to kill it” with the purring innuendo that sexual delights beyond imagining await The Hero…
It actually scares me more to kill a spider now because I was traumatized as a teenager - out on the driveway with my dad, GIANT brown spider out there heading for the garage (it was huge. Like the size of a newborn baby’s hand), and he went for it - stepped on it. Next thing we know, there are MILLIONS of baby brown spiders running all over the driveway and heading straight for the garage. I have never seen my dad run so fast for the bug killer. :eek:
I was never terrified of spiders until that day - I didn’t like them, but they didn’t scare me. Now? I have a horrible fear of a spider coming to me and saying “Hello. I am Inigo Spidora. You killed my mother. Prepare to die.”.
And I am always scared to death to kill one because I’m terrified there will be a million tiny baby spiders coming out of her belly and infesting my house.
my dad rocks [ok, rocked, he died recently] as he didn’t encourage us to be afraid of spiders, snakes or lizards. My brother and I learned to identify what we were looking at, and how to handle snakes properly so we would not be panicy at seeing them [i have no idea how someone can scream and dance around having a hissy fit at seeing a snake, I am more concerned with IDing teh snake to see if I have to just move it away or if I have to be lots more careful about not being bit.]
Doesnt stop me from being grossed out by maggots, or detesting roaches [major yuckitude there] but they dont scare me.
And we have a 1 inch wolf spider living under the bathroom sink, getting fat on any bugs that find there way into the house =) We cant wait to see how big she will get if we leave her alone=)
That was a wolf spider. They carry their eggs around with them, and their spiderlings when they are freshly hatched. Completely harmless spiders. I once opened an old storage house door, and inadvertently squashed a huge wolf spider with my hand. The first thing I knew about it was when I looked down and noticed thousands of tiny spiders crawling up my arm.
I was working peacefully at my desk one day when my boss stopped by and (a little too) casually asked me if I knew what a brown recluse looked like. Having killed one that scurried out of my roommate’s room the day before, I said yes. She asked me to look in the bathroom sink and see if there was a recluse in there.
I went in the bathroom. I looked in the sink.
I ran like hell back into the workroom where I grabbed a heavy-duty stapler, ran back to the bathroom, and proceeded to beat the everlasting shit out of the HUGE FUCKING RECLUSE in the bathroom sink. I then scoured the stapler with hand sanitizer and put it back.
One time when I was 10 a rather large black widow spider spun a web just outside my bedroom window. A dragonfly got caught right in the middle and I saw the spider devour most of the insect. (What little that remained of the dragonfly was left to rot away in the web over the next several weeks.)
My last year in college I lived in a house with four other friends. It was your pretty standard off-campus house (i.e. a dilapidated tinderbox death trap), and had been passed down from group of friends to group of friends for about five years or so, with no group ever entirely cleaning out their junk before they moved. This resulted in a cellar filled with many years’ worth of detritus. Also, cave crickets. Which, being a cross between a spider, a roach and a grasshopper, are some of the most terrifying creatures on God’s green Earth. (Especially since they have a habit of jumping at you, rather than away, as you unsuspectingly attempt to do your laundry. Brrrrr.)
Sadly, the group of friends we were planning on passing the house to after we graduated didn’t get their shit together in time, and the house ended up getting leased to another, unknown group. Which meant we had the unenviable task of cleaning out all the crapola in the basement. We’d noticed a decline in the cave crickets over the previous months, though, so we were feeling okay with it. Until we turned over an old piece of carpeting, and a black widow scurried out. And then we looked around a bit, and saw that damn near everything was covered in the pretty distinct random webs of widows. We made a hasty exit, bug-bombed the cellar, and returned the next day to clean out all the crap (and fresh widow corpses).
At least we figured out where all the cave crickets went.
