May I refer you to post # 27?
Yup - this was thoroughly debunked on MythBusters.
Since this thread popped up again, I must be meant to tell my spider story.
Day before yesterday, I swatted a housefly with a tea towel and it fell behind the breadbox. As I went to finish it off, I noticed it had landed in a spiderweb, and then I noticed that a very small, very excited spider had rushed over and was repairing the web around the fly. I thought there was no way this tiny thing (maybe half a centimeter across) could possibly deal with a rather large housefly, but it looked so happy in its little spidery way that I thought I’d give it a chance to try. It busily strengthened the web around the fly, ran out to the edge of the web, presumably to add more silk, then ran back in when the fly struggled a little. After doing web repair and leg tying for a few minutes, it finally crawled onto the fly, bit its head, and wrapped it up.
Today, I found the dried-out husk of the fly on the counter beside the breadbox. I peered behind there to see how the spider was doing, and I swear that little guy has doubled in size since Wednesday.
I’m looking for more flies now.
Shoulda yanked the daughter off to some quiet place and given her a quiet, look-Mama-in-the-eye, Serious Talking-To.
About spiders: We get niiice big orb weavers here in the Lower Hudson Valley, often with remarkable markings. Like the “fiddlebelly,” which looks alarmingly similar to the poison recluse spiders you get further south, except the recluse wears the fiddle on her back. (I think…:rolleyes: )
One of these muthas webbed up a corner of my kitchen window (outside the screen) this spring. Rather than disturb her, I kind of made a pet out of her. Every morning I checked in to make sure she was ok. She thrived, really - rainwater, yummy bugs in the web, more or less spider paradise. One night when a windstorm took out the web, she just hid inside the window frame, then came out and wove a new one.
Spiders R k3wl.
Sure, that’s how these stories always start.
The only poisonous spiders in the U.S. are the black widow and the brown recluse. I saw it on tv so it must be true.
Okay, my bio prof said it too, but he wore the exact same suit all term, no dry cleaning, which had me double checking a lot of what he said for some reason.
And mischevious, go kill that horrid roach right now! I won’t be able to sleep, ever again, if you don’t go kill it. Squash it into a paste and then set the paste on fire and sprinkle the ashes into three different bodies of rapidly moving water. I’ll be here, with every single light in the house turned on, perched on top of a stool surrounded by poison covered razor wire and a moat of the strongest acid they’ll sell me down at the ag supply place.
It’s a very good thing I’ve only encountered four roaches in my life. The two that weren’t already dead, soon were, by god. Now you’ll excuse me while I go scrub myself like they did Meryl Streep’s character in Silkwood.