I’ve been putting the fear of god into earwigs for the past two weeks. Unfortunately, this involves judicious use of my brother’s size 15, steel-toed workboots. I’m not sure if I’m so much putting the fear of god into them as beating the hell out of them. Either way, there are fewer pincher-butts in the world, and that’s fine by me.
You seem to be having this terrible problem with your lifestyle.
There’s nothing you can do about it, the scientists say. It’s just life.
Stranger
The thing about spiders is that they are like humans, they kill each other. Maybe that’s why so many people don’t like them.
I once thought that I might have increased the population of Black Widows around here tremendously. I came upon an egg sack that had just recently hatched and all the itsy-bitsy widows were hangin’ out in a cluster so I blew on it and they scattered. Now when widows first hatch they are starving hungry, at least to all appearances because they proceed to eat each other avidly. The greatly reduces the number of black widows which is a good thing. By scattering them I figured they couldn’t eat so many and more would survive to hide in my gloves that I left laying around for a couple of weeks. But then I figured that if they couldn’t eat so many, they would die of starvation anyway so it probably all came out pretty even.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if you try to kill a spider, and you don’t succeed, it will KNOW what you look like and it WILL come after you when you are sleeping.
I detest spiders. I am very afraid of spiders. shudders
Even worse, they might take a liking to you.
Two nights ago I found a spider hanging around on the bathroom ceiling. It was late at night or early morning, and I didn’t want to wake the house by pounding on it. “Leave me alone, and you’ll live to see the morning,” I told it. Then I went to bed. When I woke up the little bastard had crawled through the air vents and was a few feet away from my head. I don’t know if it thought it had made a friend, but it was definately the wrong place to be when I opened my eyes.
As an aside, I blame most of my rampant arachnophobia squarely on the Scouts - nothing beats spending a week in old army tents that have dozens of the biggest Daddy Longlegs I’ve ever seen huddled in the corners every night.
BraheSilver - ‘Even worse, they might take a liking to you.’
Oh dear Gawd… I can’t imagine… :eek:
Just being utterly and unnecessarily pedentic here, but the creature commonly referred to as a “Daddy-Long-Legs” (order Opiliones) is taxanomically distinct from spiders, which are of order Araneae. Not that you arachnophobes care. 
Here is the Master’s word on the topic of Daddy-Long-Legs.
Stranger
:smack: Order! Not species. Sorry.
An Open Letter to the Spider Community of San Dimas, CA
July 15, 2005
Dear neighbors,
It is with a heavy heart that I speak to you this morning following last night’s traumatic events. It is my sincere hope that, by having an open dialogue now, we can all avoid incidents like this one in the future.
As many of you are surely already aware, shortly before 3am this morning, a member of your community met his demise. While I was half-awake, calmly using the bathroom, the deceased - without any warning whatsoever - decided to scuttle up my leg in what we humans would say was analogous to “suicide by cop.” The results, while tragic, were predictable.
At the time of the writing of this letter, the deceased’s remains have not yet been identified.
Friends, make no mistake about it: I understand that the life of a spider is a difficult one. Your webs get broken, you get chased out of your home, human children torture you, rival species eat your prey, other species eat you – it’s tough, no doubt. I’m sure some of you get very frustrated; some of you probably even get downright depressed. And perhaps you even reach a point where you feel that life is no longer worth living. It’s okay – we get that way too, sometimes.
But please understand that traumatizing a human on your way out is simply not the solution. This may seem like an amusing way to go, but what you all have to realize is, you’re putting your brethren in jeopardy. A less-stable human than myself, for example, might well have been so distressed as to seek out ANY spider for destruction after surviving such an episode.
Here me now, spiders: no one wants a war.
Now, I understand that the deceased may have been a rogue arachnid with no regard for the plight of his kin. But you never can be sure who the next suicidal spider might be. And so, I emplore each and every one of you to be vigilant. Keep a close eye on your children, on your parents, your friends and your neighbors. Watch for the warning signs (shifty eyes, random mad giggling, a sudden affinity for humans, etc.) and act without hesitation.
You just may be averting disaster.
Sincerely,
Asimovian
I gave my three-year-old nephew a little “bug house” for his birthday, so he could catch bugs and look at them. The idea is that you keep the bug in the container for a few hours while you study it and then you SET IT FREE, a concept I tried valiantly to impress upon him.
Unfortunately it didn’t take, and apparently the bug house has been the instrument of death for dozens of interesting but luckless bugs. Naturally my sister, his mother is thrilled. 
Since this thread has popped up again, I’ll say that I did release the murdering-bastard daddy longlegs outside.
I remember talking about insect algorithms in robotics class, and that the cockroach’s was very simple. Something like: When something happens, run until you hit a wall. Follow the wall until hidden (dark, and in a small area). Stay there for a while.
This algorithm runs into problems if you put the cockroach inside a bell jar. It just runs in circles until exhausted.
It’s funny when someone being utterly and unnecessarily pedantic spells “pedantic” wrong.
My theory on the corner-dwelling spiders is that they will eventually move out of the corner and into the range of territory that might allow them to crawl on me, therefore even the corner-dwellers must be killed on sight. Fortunately, we don’t seem to have many spiders in this house; I don’t know if my bug-eating cat has anything to do with this.
Spiders will be spiders!
I used to catch bugs and put them outside, but I’m giving up. The bugs have taken over, and I just don’t care any more. I’ve had lots of fireflies visiting me lately, and I’ve been too lazy to catch them and take them outside. I don’t feel bad about killing ants–I don’t mind them coming to visit, but it’s really rude for them to invite all their friends to crash at my place. Miss Manners would not approve.
In the Much-Worse-than-a-Dead-Spider Category: Dead Mouse. I had a little mouse invasion last winter, and I got a nice little trap that catches them live, so I could take them and let them go outside (far, far away, so they’d never come back). That worked just fine for a while–I’d wind up the trap, put something tasty inside, and around midnight, I’d hear it snap, and then the mouse would start gnawing on the trap, making a godawful racket, so I wouldn’t sleep much that night. So I always knew there was a mouse in the trap. And they had little bits of corn chips or whatever I used for bait, so they had a little snack, and they wouldn’t starve overnight. Until one day I found the trap with a little mummified mouse in it. :eek: Poor mousie. I didn’t mean to kill it, really.
An even sadder story: I found a luna moth that was just about ready to hatch, so I put it in a jar so I could watch it hatch. I didn’t know that they come out with wet wings, and they need to stretch them out to dry. So I put it in a jar that wasn’t big enough (it was a good-size canning jar, but luna moths are big, too), the luna moth came out, it didn’t have enough room, and the wings were shriveled, so it didn’t live very long. I felt really, really bad. After that, I stuck to collecting cast-off cicada shells, so I wouldn’t kill anything.
One more sad story, this time with butterflies:
Scene: The Butterfly House in the Museum of Life and Science. Very cool place–they have a tropical butterfly room and an outside area with local butterflies. This is right next to the Bug House, where they have giant centipedes and poison frogs and all kinds of other cool creepy-crawlies. The most entertaining part is watching other people freaking out over these huge bugs.
So I’m standing around talking to my mom, watching the butterflies flutter around, and we were right next to a little girl (maybe 3 years old). A butterfly landed on the ground, and she stomped it flat! Her mom looked so mortified. I’m sure she was wishing the ground would just open up and swallow her.
Wot? The little girl?
I wasn’t thinking about it that way, but maybe that’s right. No, I meant Butterfly-Stomping Girl’s mom wanted to disappear.
The computer simulated ones, maybe. The monster my roommate caught in the bathtub has been living quite happily in a canning jar on top of our fridge for over a year. He perches on top of his saltine and waves his antennae at us in a most arrogant manner.
mischievous
For the last week, I have had a most determined spider that patiently spins a web at the top of my door frame every morning, sits there thinking tiny aracnoid thoughts all day, and then cheerfully drops onto my head each night when I go out.
I’ve never gotten a good look at it, since I usually have my eyes closed and my hands slapping the air by the time I become aware of my Littlest Stalker.
Onto your head? Excuse me while I go crouch in the corner and whimper.
My husband, O Wise One that he be, says Daddy Long Legs are the most poisonous spider of all, but because their little itty bitty mouths are so teensy eensy, they aren’t a danger to us simply because they aren’t able to bite us.
Anybody heard that?