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I used to let spiders live freely in my house, until one time I wanted to go to bed at night and noticed dozens of black spots on the bed cover. I looked up and
by tomerv 5y ago
I used to let spiders live freely in my house, until one time I wanted to go to bed at night and noticed dozens of black spots on the bed cover. I looked up and saw hundreds of tiny spider babies on the ceiling. From then on, whenever I see a spider in the house I get rid of it. Sorry...
- _carbyau_ 5y agoNo problems from me! My policy is generally live and let live. But once they invade my space I take measures. Unfortunately, my wife is phobia level scared of spiders. So now if they bother her, by extension that is bothering me, and so I take measures to make sure they don't bother her. But I motorbike commute every day with webs around my dash/handlebars. I wish my little spider bro good luck every ride.
- culi 5y agomost of those babies will probably die on their own anyways. If they do survive to adulthood it's only because they managed to kill some other bugs. So it'd be a net of less total bugs in your house if you just let them be
- bryans 5y agoDon't get me wrong, I still find families of baby spiders to be absolutely terrifying in every way, and it takes every bit of my willpower to fight the urge to remove them from existence. But at the end of the day, the key word is family. It's a group of living things, with parents that apparently have the emotional capacity to care about them. Hopefully when you say "get rid of it," that means gently coaxing them into a box and putting them outside.
- poisonarena 5y agoYou are assuming very human or even mammalian qualities and constructs like "parents/family/emotion" to invertebrates that have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates. If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion.
- edumucelli 5y agoMany humans do that to other humans, so I do not see how different we are from them.
- marcellus23 5y agoOh come on.
- bryans 5y agoThe largest spiders are almost universally docile toward humans, so your own assumption doesn't really hold water.
- birksherty 5y agoNo species can come even close to humans in killing others without any hesitation. Have you even seen the documentary Earthlings? http://www.nationearth.com/ http://www.nationearth.com/
- Levitz 5y agoOh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem. Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No. Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
- AwaAwa 5y agoHuman industrial slaughter where animals are trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) would beg to differ. Or how about male chicks being liquefied and fed back to the chickens? Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter. This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
- mym1990 5y agoYou’re Vin Diesel’s kinda person.
- cmsefton 5y agoIt's worth mentioning to check the species first before putting them back out. Some spiders are house spiders, and can't really survive outdoors. I generally put them into my garden shed or, if possible, into the loft instead, but most of the time, I just leave them alone.
- andai 5y agoI've always wondered about that, did they evolve after the invention of houses?
- cmsefton 5y agoMy knowledge on it is pretty basic, but as I understand, house spiders are adapted to living indoors: climate, food supply, and so forth. It's probable that over time spiders adapted to live in caves or tree hollows probably found it quite easy to move into dwellings, and stay there, to the extent that now some species have their entire life cycle based around dwellings. [Edit: I googled around, and this was an interesting article from Rod Crawford, the curator of arachnid collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Seattle talking about house spiders being traced back to Roman times. https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology/arachnology-and-entomology/spider-myths/myth-spiders-come-indoors https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology... ]
- jjk166 5y agoGenerally they can live just fine in the wild somewhere, and human indoor climates merely replicate their natural habitat. Odds are without shelter or clothing or other artificial methods of controlling temperature you'd be pretty screwed wherever you currently live too.
- praptak 5y agoNo, they evolved to become synanthropic. That's usually a good deal for a species unless humans change their ways. The black cellar beetle was very popular in Europe living in preindustrial era because it lived in wooden buildings and is now endangered because these buildings are becoming rare.
- freeflight 5y agoYour bed is very likely already crawling with all kinds of organisms, spiders at least keep mosquitoes in check.
- lenkite 5y agoBetter to keep house lizards instead of spiders for pest control. House Lizards don't muck up the place.
- mellavora 5y agoI get rid of them, too. By gently escorting them out a window. And, like you, I apologize to them and wish them well.
- elcomet 5y agoHouse spiders usually cannot live outside. So you're also most likely killing them by escorting them outside (I do this too btw, because I don't want to crush them, but I know that outside is likely not better for them).
- johnyzee 5y agoA tip if you are scared of spiders: Trap them in a glass, then slide some hard surface underneath. You can now move the spider (like out a window) while holding it trapped with the lid. This has actually eliminated much of my arachnophobia, since I find myself studying the spider, safely confined inside the glass before letting it out. (This is actually one way they treat phobias clinically, a kind of desensitization exercise)
- mkl 5y agoMuch quicker and more convenient is a spider catcher like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001356203377.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001356203377.html With that I can easily pick them up and drop them out the window or whatever. You can do it at well over arms' length too. It doesn't seem to harm them, as there's a space within the grabbing cage that they get directed to. Small spiders can crawl out between the cage bits but usually stay on the end long enough to move them elsewhere. Big spiders are fully caught.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoWrong link?
- mkl 5y agoLooks right to me. A green and white plastic spider catcher. What do you see?