what causes arachnophobia?

Factual Questions
41

[QUOTE=Bambi Hassenpfeffer]
Flickr’s back in a good mood, so here’s its top side.
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Flickr’s gorgeous - her front and back. I tell you what - the sex lives of these guys will give the book an X rating. I hope this level of depravity can be discussed on the SD wihtout me getting banned. Oh well, here goes. With argiope, sexual canabalism happens before he has even finished - and I have seen the photos! The guy’s palp is locked in place and keeps doing its job even when its owner has gone to where dead spiders go. Eaten. Well, his juices slurped out - his remains just hanging around still attached to the female.

I have been meeting with an expert of sexual cannabalism. He has some great stories to tell. Can’t wait to write that chapter. Fortunately for some male spiders, not all species go in for that sort of thing. There is another one where the male binds the female to the leaf, does his thing, then makes his getaway before she gets free. And you thought your sex lives were fraught with danger?

Argiope are all so beautifully elegant. Thank you for that!

Lynne

42

[QUOTE=blackhobyah]
However, the spiders I most commonly get in my house are these, (don’t look of you’re arachnophobic, I had to do it very quickly and couldn’t stand to open the pictures to full size), and I have to kill them, because even walking past them scares me. …
It’s not a rational fear, although we have poisonous spiders in Australia, it’s not fear of being bitten. I have a few species of deadly snakes live on my property, and I’m cautious, but snakes fascinate me and I like watching them. …

One my my more terrifying memories is of a three day riding/camping trip I did in the High Country out of Bright. I was sitting around the campfire and caught movement out of the corner of my eye. It was an enormous, coal-black, shiny spider (as it turned out, a male Funnel Web, and you can look those up for yourself).
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This very much matches what I gather from many Australians. It is the harmless, but large, huntsman which causes the most fear. I was the same - but now I can have them on the wall above the bed and go to sleep with ease. That took a few years!

So it really isn’t the fear of being bitten driving the arachophobia. We are getting two aspects from this discussion - the way they move, maybe the unpredictability and predator like behaviour. Or some key event triggering the reaction. Maybe both being buillt on some innate fear.

For non-Aussies - our ‘funnel webs’ are big ground dwelling biting spiders. The funnel-webs usually don’t go wandering - but when the males do they can be all over a camping area causing havok. According to what I have been told, that is only after rain, because they are primitive spiders, and unlike the moderns, can’t regulate moisture well. So rain in summer, and the males all go belting around looking for a female’s burrows.

I love watching snakes, from a safe distance, too. There is talk that Snake will be the next book. But my publisher has also mentioned ‘Shark’. But my heart is totally in ‘Spider’.

Thank you blackhobyah - and everyone, including the inimitable bigbabysweets2000, for all the ideas and stories. I am loving them.

Lynne

43

[QUOTE=lynne-42]
This very much matches what I gather from many Australians. It is the harmless, but large, huntsman which causes the most fear.
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I think I nearly got killed by a huntsman once (indirectly, Your Honour). I was about twelve, and sitting in the back seat of the car coming back from a camping trip with the Olds. There is a treacherous stretch of road down a mountain pass. It’s all TRUCKS MUST USE LOW GEAR NEXT 3KM signs, holes in the barricade where people have gone over the side, badly cambered corners and tight hairpins. The $#^# huntsman had been hiding in the car somewhere for the last 300 kilometres, and decided this stretch of road was a good time to reveal himself by crawling across the windscreen and then up onto the ceiling of the car where it stopped for a rest just over my mum’s head. She near had a fit and was screaming, and my step-father couldn’t pull over until the bottom of the pass, not with a sheer cliff about five feet from the road and a Kenworth behind us. Bloody spiders.