I have told you before about my battles with the spiders, which are far more plentiful in Oregon than they were in my last state of residence (Utah), or the state before that (California), or indeed anyplace else on the planet (Earth). My policy has always been one of the utmost tolerance: The spiders may live anywhere they please except inside my apartment. This gives them a lot of freedom, for the vast majority of the world consists of areas that are not my apartment. Why, just stepping out my front door I am instantly within sight of dozens of places a spider could live that are not my apartment.
Unfortunately, spiders are like children, in that telling them they cannot do something only makes them want to do it more. (They are also like children in that they are always getting "underfoot," and if they misbehave you can squish them with a Kleenex and flush them down the toilet.) The spiders have become bolder, and I'm afraid my tolerance is being tested.
Not long ago I noticed that a large spider had built a web on top of the shrubbery located right outside my front door. Not in my apartment, no -- but very, very close. This put me in an awkward position. I had always told my friends, "I have nothing against spiders! I wouldn't mind at all if one moved in on my block, or even next door!" And my friends had always been impressed by my progressive attitudes. So imagine the shame I would have felt if they knew how uncomfortable it made me now that a spider had moved in so close!
I tried to be neighborly to this spider. I sought to understand it. The first thing I did was to assign a gender to it. I decided it was male. This is because "he" is easier to type than "she," and also because the spider exhibited classic male behavior: sitting around, waiting for food to magically appear, devouring it quickly, and not yakking the whole time about what he did all day.
Being very scientifically minded, I performed an experiment wherein I threw a pebble at the web to see if the spider would try to eat it. My scientific finding was that he did not. In fact, he didn't even react to the pebble at first. He seemed to know instinctively that the object that had just landed on his property was not food. After a few seconds he scurried over to it and cut it down, then excreted some fibers to reinforce the part of the web that had been compromised. It was a pretty impressive operation, actually, and very efficient. I mean, someone broke a window on my car and I didn't replace it for three months.
In the further interest of science, I threw some more pebbles onto the web, and a leaf, too. I figured this would annoy the spider enough to make him move away. But then again, the life of a spider is pretty boring. Industrious bugs like ants go out in search of food, while the lazy spiders just sit around and wait for food to show up. So maybe this spider actually enjoyed my fun pebble game, as it gave him something to do.
Of course, maybe the spider wasn't trying to eat the pebbles because he wasn't hungry. To test this hypothesis, I found a black ant in the dirt, picked it up, and flicked it onto the web. I kind of felt bad for the ant, and that is why I did not assign it a gender, because I did not want to get attached. It had been minding its own business on the ground, far away from the spider web four feet above. The queen had probably warned it, "Never go crawling up into the shrub, because spiders live there." She probably hadn't seen fit to mention, "Oh, but a giant might pick you up and toss you into a web anyway, and then you're screwed." So I felt bad. But only a little, because it was just an ant, and this was science.
The instant the ant hit the web, the spider was upon it, wrapping it up in thread and bringing it back to the middle. You can't just eat the ant way out on the fringes of the web. What are we, savages? No, you have to bring it to the center of the web. That's where we do our dining.
The spider did his spidery things, which I guess meant injecting some venom into the ant to kill it. Then he ate it. It was very cool. I thought the spider would just suck the ant's fluids out and leave a shell, but nope. He actually ATE the ant. This spider was HARDCORE.
Now that I understood a little about how my spider neighbor lived, I felt more comfortable with him residing just outside my front door. But it turns out I was a fool to be lulled into a sense of security so easily. Two days later I opened my front door and there on the doorstep was: the spider. He had crawled in under the screen door and was apparently just waiting for me to open the main door and let him into the house.
"Oh, no you don't!" I said, putting my hands on my hips. "You're not coming in here!" Perhaps the spider had taken my game of Throw Things at the Web all too much to heart. Maybe he thought we were pals now. Maybe he just wanted to play some more. Also, maybe I shouldn't have given him the ant. It was probably like feeding a stray cat, or providing day labor for illegal aliens. Next thing you know they're showing up every day, wanting more. (Spiders: Eating the ants that Americans won't eat.)
Now I was on the horns of a dilemma. You are aware of my policy toward spiders, and how it is the same as my policy toward ballerinas: I am in awe of your natural beauty and flawless instincts, but if you come in my house I will kill you. I have thus far carried out this policy with total ruthlessness, killing each and every spider (and ballerina) that has entered my home, no matter how "small" or "harmless" or "one of God's creatures" it is. Surely the word would have spread by now. Surely the young spider children were using my apartment in their campfire stories. "Never go into Old Man Snider's house!" they whisper as they hold their tiny flashlights under their chins. "No one's ever come out alive!" If I had access to the spider community's mass media publications -- their newspapers, or their (please forgive me) websites -- I would have announced my policy to them directly. But since that was impossible, I had to rely on my consistency to convey the message.
Yet at the same time, I kind of liked this particular spider. I'd been very impressed with the cool things he was doing out on his web. The way he chomped down that ant was spectacular. Maybe I could make an exception just this once and shoo him outside rather than squishing him?
No. Seeking to understand your opponent is fine, but not if it makes you slack off in your vigilance. That's how it is with violent extremist Islam, and that's how it is with spiders. Besides, as soon as I opened the door, the spider had begun to skitter inside, and I do not react well to skittering. If my own mother had eight legs and skittered the way spiders do, I would stomp her, too. So my spider friend was quickly dispatched, and I grieved for the loss of a friend and a hard-learned lesson.
Then I made the following chart:
REASONS WHY SPIDERS ARE BETTER THAN ME
| SPIDER | ERIC |
|---|---|
| Has eight legs. | Has two legs. |
| Has eight eyes (probably). | Has four eyes (two artificial). |
| Immediately pounces on food as soon as it appears. | Procrastinates cooking until he gets really, really hungry, then just eats whatever's handy because he's too hungry to make anything time-consuming. |
| Repairs web damage soon after it occurs. | Still hasn't replaced the porch light, which burned out two years ago. |
| Is not tricked into eating things that are not food. | Has been known to eat Marshmallow Peeps, Red Vines, and cotton candy. |
| Actively seeks better places to live. | Mostly just complains about the neighborhood. |
| Can tell instinctively whether an object being thrown at it is food or not. | Must examine and perhaps even taste the item before making a determination. |
| Primary duty is sitting around all day. | Same. |
If Mom had eight legs, I bet we'd all enjoy watching her skitter about the house. But we'd have to get at least one of her hips replaced every 3000 miles with her oil change, and that could start to add up.
I liked the imagery of you telling the spider off with your hands on your hips.
I wonder what your friends at PETA would say about this one... The willful killing of ants in the name of science. Disgraceful!
Pretty good column. Lately my sister has been dealing with a nasty spider called the "Brown Widow." I didn't think there was such a thing, but apparently it is the less handsome brother of the Black Widow. It also has an hourglass on its back, has very bad venom, and there were 100!!! of them on her house, hidden away.
Recently, my parents had a spider that constructed huge webs every night at the entry way of the carport. My parents' carport light attracts thousands of Louisiana bugs, so that spider had it pretty good. I got into the habit of carefully walking out to my car every night when I left so that I wouldn't walk into the web. Sometimes, I would stand there and watch the spider build the web and race over to wrap up the bugs that got caught in it's web. The web went from the roof of the house to the ground. Sometimes, but not very often, the web was attached to my mom's car. I kinda liked that spider, too.
A bug-loving friend of mine has started taking really fantastic pictures of bugs and posting them at his Insect Picture of the Day website (insectpod.com), and some of them are quite pretty. All of them make me look for a shoe.
Eric how very coincidental that this article should appear on the very morning after the demisse of a HUGE dark brown spider in my kitchen. (Huge, I tell you. OK myabe not quite the size of a dime, but in my mind, that is just way too big) I live in the northern mountain area of New Mexico, and spiders generally take it upon themselves to enter my home and do as they please. Like you I have a no spider policy, and like you, when they tend to skitter, I generally tend to freak right the hell out and in my panic resort to any means necessary to end the horror.
My approach: spraying the fiend with half a can of scrubbing bubbles cleaner, which was the closest weapon on hand. Spider? Dead. Can? Near empty....
As an aside I noticed that arachnaphobia was on tv the other day- I for a brief second considered watching it and then remembered the trauma from the last time I watched it in the theater some what, 15 years ago (or more, I forget).
Oh by the way, your spider looks like what we call monkey spiders around here- I don't know why they are called that, but they have this wierd looking snakeskin kind of look to them, and they grow pretty big maybe two inches in diameter. My daughter forced me to catch one for her once for show and tell, and I about fainted.
I also live in the mountainous bit of Northern New mexico, and we tend to get those huge spiders too. I currently have one residing in my garage window. We've always called them golf ball spiders, because if you have a pregnant female, it gets enormous. I personally don't really have a problem with spiders unless they are actually crawling on me. I actually had a pet black widow for about six hours, before my mother found it and freaked out. Poor Squishy.
Eric, I think you have the makings of a Pixar movie here.
Ha...Eric, I must say this is your funniest Snide Remarks yet. First of all, I don't quite understand how you had determined that the spider outside your front door was "the" spider. It could've been another...
And another spider killed. :( And another ant. :(
Here's where I'm supposed to come up with something clever and witty but I'm feeling too ookey and very creeped out at the moment. Spiders...ick! *shivers*
Some spiders liquify, other spiders eat ore of their prey. From Wikipedia: "Other spiders with more powerfully built chelicerae masticate the entire body of their prey and leave behind only a relatively small residue of indigestible materials."
Excellent, I was laughing all the way through, but when I read:
"Procrastinates cooking until he gets really, really hungry, then just eats whatever's handy because he's too hungry to make anything time-consuming."
I 'bout split my ribs! :-P Oh the predicaments of man.....
The spiders in my house are completely ignoring my "No Spider" policy. But they are tricky little guys as they stay hidden, for the most part, until they decide to curl up and die in the same bedroom in my basement. I have no idea what it is about my basement that make spiders think it's a good burial ground, but it's almost amusing.
if you were brave enough you could take your spider over to your car and he/she could spin a web where your window used to be. food for your friend and wind protection for the vehicle plus entertainment value! plus he/she could weave thoughtful messages into the web.
"some pig"
"loser"
"single"
"cutie pie"
"check out my web page"
the possibilities are endless!
This was a good pile of fun! But when I saw the picture, I could have sworn Eric had hacked into my computer and stolen pictures we have of a similar spider that set up shop in our carport. Unlike Eric, I never admired the ugly beast, not even a little. We spent two weeks trying to make life miserable for the critter, but it just wouldn't leave, so we finally knocked it down and took it to the Bean Museum, where an employee identified it simply as an orb weaver spider and unceremoniously dumped it into the bushes outside the museum entrance.
Good thing it didn't come into my house. I would have used an entire package of Charmin on it and that just seems wasteful.
Alternatively, you could put the spider on your hubcaps for some low-cost spinners!
Eric, I applaud your whole attitude and policy regarding spiders and where they can live, as it echoes my own. And even though your treatment of the spider in question may seem somewhat harsh please try to remember that HE broke the rules not YOU.
No matter what you chucked at his web he was still free to move anywhere else besides your apartment. From the photo, it is quite clear that your neighborhood is lousy with spider-freindly locations. He just had a very bad attitude.
The "No Spiders" policy seems very popular. I also adhere to this and fully expect the neighborhood spiders to do the same. I rarely see live spiders in my house. I pay an exterminator GOOD money every other month to ensure my "No Spiders" policy. However, my house must be inundated with them as I see dead spiders on the floor and carpet almost weekly. So I have adopted a new house policy, which is, "The Only Good Spider is a DEAD Spider."
Enough said.
I once wrote a spider Haiku. I forgot about it until I read this. It goes like this:
Oh hello, spider.
Let me introduce you to
my friend, the vacuum.
Or something like that.
I haven't left any comments since finding your hilarious site but this one takes the cake! I could actually see myself doing just exactly as you described the events. The only difference is my "No Spider" policy includes anywhere even near my house - thus avoiding the possibility that one might attempt to cross the threshold.
This is why it is useful to have a couple of cats in the house. Our cats make pretty quick work of anything smaller than them. Well, after playing around with them for a while, anyway. Seldom will a fly, mosquito, spider, or beetle wander into my house and survive more than a couple of hours before they are toyed with and consumed by Frankie the Cat.
Biff Miffle:
Very high-quality haiku. Funniest part about the whole shootin' match.
Mostly I don't want them in my bed or some other close proximity.
I don't mind them around TOO much because they eat other nasty bugs that I surely don't want around.
Spider on my arm-not too good. Spider in the corner. He must be eating something! So I say, keep up the good work!
AdamOndi: Good point, but then what do you use to get rid of the pesky cats?
richrich - HILARIOUS!!
Biff Miffle- love the haiku
Gwyn - We're neighbors! I never find anyone else online who actually lives in NNM.
#18--Our exterminator admitted to us that unless you gas your house for most of the day or longer, there is nothing they can do to kill the spiders in your home. Their legs are so long that they can just step over any anti-spider poison you leave on the ground, and they can hold their breath for hours, making a quick gassing impractical. So I suspect you're paying your exterminator good money to little to no effect.
And for the record, when I was three, my older brothers attacked me, wrapped me in a blanket, and tried to flush me down the toilet (or so they threatened). That is, until I cried and my mother slapped them silly. So children really are like spiders.
Eric, your little brother Lane is funny.
We don't have many spiders around here, for some reason, except the tiny ones that make their ugly cobwebby patches on the ceiling or on the stucco near the porch light. But then they catch the tiny bugs, too, so I don't complain too much.
Very funny column, Eric. I am a little disappointed, though, that you didn't even ask your brother (me) what kind of spider it is. I HAVE been an exterminator for over 5 years you know. Answer: I don't know.
Well done, Eric. I wish I had your courage. There was a huge spider (well, about a centimeter in diameter) in my bathtub when I went to take a shower the other day. I didn't want to touch it, no matter how much toilet paper was between my hand and the beast, so I just ran to my mom's bathroom. Arachnids have me in their power.
I have the same basic spider policy, expanded to include too large, too close to the door and other frequented outdoor places, but with an exception: The little hunting spiders which eat other spiders as well as bugs can stay. They don't bite people (nice), and we often mutually scare each other. The best kind we had were in Provo, UT, which spider was black with iridescent green, and white tufts of hairs in the leg joints. I have no idea what kind they were other than "little black hunting spider, doesn't seem to make a web, not black widow" and they were great other bug/spider exterminators. Anyone have an idea what they were? I wish I had some where I live now because all the spiders here are safety question marks, so they fall under the no spider general rule. I would love to sic the little black hunting spiders on them...
I believe that is an Araneus diadematus, or garden spider/cross spider. They are the most famous of the orb weavers and generally build big orb-like webs on low bushes, and just chill in the middle waiting for food. It has the right colored legs, from what I can tell from the picture, but other than that I can't see it very well.
Hi Eric! I've been reading your column for a few months now at Randy's behest (I'm the guy over at insectpod.com). Great column... the ballerina bit nearly choked me to death.
Spiders will inject venom to kill prey, then inject it with digestive juices to dissolve the innards, and then suck out the gooey bits. When spiders are very hungry they will repeat the inject/suck process until even the chitinous exoskeleton of the prey dissolves, and then the spider eats that, too.
If you had flicked 2 or 3 more ants into the spider's web, it would have eventually started eating the tasty bits and leaving the exoskeletons behind.
I haven't studied ballerinas, so I don't know if they do this also.
Eric you jinxed me. I now have TWO spiders (small monkey variety I think) who have set up resdience JUST OUTSIDE my front door. My daughter insists on taking them to school. I may not survive....
This has to be a conspiracy......
This was a really funny column. I'm sure my co-workers think I'm crazy for sitting at my computer laughing. I actually read it yesterday and didn't plan to comment on it. However, I had a dream last night about being chased by large spiders who invaded my home. Since I don't usually dream, I'm blaming this one on you! ;-)
Regarding your chart, Eric, spiders have six eyes. Also, I'm surprised that you didn't have a lot of spiders in Lake Elsinore. Where I live, in San Jacinto, they're EVERYWHERE. Everywhere, I say! And the worst is what a large portion of them are black widows. Those things make me shiver. I can't even stand to stomp them. I'm forced to find heavy objects to drop on top of them, because I don't want to risk having one evade my approaching foot and somehow end up walking on it, which happened once, and ohmygosh, did I FREAK!
And to Deb: Any spider that's big enough that I can SEE that it has hairs on its joints is DEFINITELY going to die, and fast.
The Spider House Rule is also fully in effect in our home, though while we were living in Phoenix, this rule was child's play compared to the Scorpion Rule. Like their more well known arachnid kin, scorpions have a penchant for climbing into nooks and crannies and scaring the h-e-double hockey sticks out of you when you least expect it, only at ten times the level of terror (that's an exact figure, by the way.)
No, for typical desert hairy scorpions, a wad of toilet tissue doesn't cut it. I believe I dispatched the last one we found, the one that drove my wife to screaming whilst standing on top of the thin back part of the couch, by literally dropping the entire phonebook on it then jumping up and down on said phonebook.
Did you know scorpions fluoresce (glow green) in black light? Creepy little buggers.
I've always held the same general policy: as long as I don't see them, spiders can live - but the moment I see them (especially indoors), they're dead.
Though not all methods work to killing the little buggers (hairspray and whatnot), I can say that microwaving does work. When I was just a kid, my mom tried the hairspray thing on a black widow in our house. It just crouched when it was being sprayed and then sprang back up and started running as soon as the spraying stopped. So she put it in a jar. When my dad got home, he put it in the microwave for 10 seconds. It kind of ran around a bit and then would twitch until it finally curled up. No spectacular explosion or anything, but it left a horrible smell and I wouldn't use the microwave for days afterward. Definitely not my preferred method of spider killing, but for the morbid out there, yes, it works.
This was great. My favorite column of the year.
I read the ballerina part and couldn't stop laughing. And to answer your question #32, one of my friends used to be a ballerina and she eats hardly anything. We also had two ballerinas stay at our house one time, and they didn't eat much either
#35: Take it up with Wikipedia, which says they usually have eight eyes.
Hey #36, your comment about glowing scorpions brought back fond memories of my dad spending summer evenings out in our backyard, equipped with a light and a hammer. I think he enjoyed scorpion squashing almost as much as he enjoys fishing, and that's saying something!
Melis-
I'm in Los Alamos, how about you?
Gwyn- I work in Los Alamos, live in Truchas (yep, I'm a commuter!)
SMALL WORLD!!
(Ah Eric, does it not warm the cockles of your heart as you bring people together, united by the adoration of snide remarks and the mutual facination/fear of spiders?)
We got scorpions (sometimes inside!) here in Oklahoma, too. The reason I prefer them to spiders is that scorpions, as a rule, don't leave the ground.
It occurs to me that maybe we don't have many spiders in the house because we have so many lizards outside. The lizards never bothered me, but now I consider them some of my best friends.
We do get the black widows, though, in the garage and on the swing set and other places in the yard. Rarely in the house, but occasionally. One time there was a big egg in a web on the pool filter, and I tried to brush it off, and it burst open and many, many tiny black widow babies came out and swarmed all over my arm. Creepy. So the other night when I ran into a web on our current above-ground pool, I was somewhat dismayed.
In the philippines, we'd kill scorpions by dousing them with rubbing alcohol and dropping a match on them. It was instantaneous. Probably works for just about anything, although those are the only things I'd kill on sight in my apartment.
I have a no-spider policy, too. I figure I fill the bug-killing niche inside my apartment, so the presence of the spider is unnecessary. Also, they give me the heebie-jeebies.
I usually kill spiders in the bathroom and kitchen with Shower Power, which melts their exoskeletons and has a nice minty smell. You can then mop up the spider at your leisure. It's actually pretty cool, since the dead spider never gets crunchy, but is all floppy. And when you go to get it with the paper towel, its legs fall off.
There was one of those giant brown terrifying spiders in my bathroom today, but I'm quite certain it was dead. It was curled up and there was a leg laying to one side. I wanted to smush it just to make sure, because I realized if I were a spider, I would kill another spider and steal one of its legs to use in situations like that. I was too scared to smush it. Too scared to smush a dead spider.
I live a 30 seconds' walk away from Phoenix (i. e., two streets), and I've never had a problem with scorpions. My grandfather (same area), on the other hand, used to get them all the time, but they stopped appearing about ten years ago or so. His preferred method of killing: take 'em out back and beat 'em to death with a 9-iron.
WD-40 kills spiders, too. I just grab whatever spray can is closest when I want to commit spidercide, so I've gotten them with all kinds of things. I guess they usually drown.
that was odd and very much in depth
I used to not have a huge problem with spiders. Until I was in 8th grade & we were watching Arachniphobia when the birthday girl's dad dropped a turantula into the popcorn bowl I was holding. I completely freaked! The spider flew across the room & I jumped on the couch & screamed like a - well - little girl. The father freaked out because his beloved spider was in danger.
Sick. Sick. Sick.
Great column, Eric. I, too, enjoyed the visual of you standing in the doorway, hands on hips, saying, "Oh no you don't!" Too funny.
At Girls Camp a few weeks ago, an older girl and I watched transfixed one evening as a massive spider spun his web. (We knew it was a man because he was spinning a web outside of a girls' dorm.) We watched as he expelled webbing from his derriere and artfully arranged the web from there (hmmm...) We came back the next morning, and sure enough, Skeazy Spider had food. Yay, Skeazy Spider!
We came back that night, and he had even more food cocooned in his web. We were happy for Skeazy Spider.
The next morning, though, the first years had arrived. And they destroyed Skeazy Spider's web along with his trove of food. They knew that Skeazy Spider was really trying to trap innocent young girls into his web where he could liquify their insides and eat them.
Still, we felt bad for Skeazy Spider. Old friend.
Last night we cleaned out the basement of our old house, and it looked like the after-effects of "Arachnophobia" with less fire used. These were mostly dead Hobo Spiders (or I guess I mean: Mostly they were Hobo Spiders who were dead, and not zombie-spiders, although there were many exceptions.) (I hate exceptions.) Anyway, it was gucky and spider-corpsey.
What's worse than seeing a spider in your house?
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.
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NOT seeing the spider run into your house ...
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
Comments & Reaction:
A cursory glance at some spider sites on the Internet suggest that spiders liquefy their prey's insides and then suck it out. This is because spiders do not have teeth with which to chew their food. But I swear to you, this spider ATE that ant. I was watching him, I turned away for a minute, and when I came back the ant was half gone. I guess it's possible the spider had broken the ant in two and discarded half, but I really think he was eating it, exoskeleton and all. Maybe I should have examined his guts after I gooshed him to see if I could find ant remains.
SnideCast Note: The queen ant has the same voice as the Queen of England, as portrayed in a previous column.
I tried to take a picture of my spider friend. This is not easy to do. Spiders are small compared to other things you normally take pictures of, and their webs are often nearly invisible, particularly against a backdrop of daylight. Nonetheless, here is the photo I got, in which forced perspective makes the spider look to be about a foot in diameter. Please understand that his web was constructed over a different shrub, not the one you see in the background. The one in the background is about 30 feet away. The spider was about an inch in size. I should have put my hand next to him to give you some perspective, but I didn't think about it.
Commenter #31 below has helped me identify the spider in question: Araneus diadematus, or European garden spider. That's what kind my spider friend was, and it's the type I see in abundance in my neighborhood. The Wikipedia entry for this spider says "it is hard to provoke a garden spider to bite," which sounds like a challenge to me. Anyway, now I know what I'm up against.