What unusual thing have you found out about spiders (or bugs in general)?

I live in australia and there’s some huge spiders here- I was driving down a narrow, winding road (like something you’d see in Peru ) and one ran across the windscreen. I managed to not lose it but barely. It was a huntsman in case you want to google how big and ugly they are.

@trailsillustrated I know about those guys. They’re awesome or flat out scary, depending on your situation, and your disposition toward bugs. LOL This guy really likes them. Don’t watch if you’re squeamish. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCO56iyBXtU

When my children were little they used to keep pet spiders. Our favorites were jumping spiders and wolf spiders.

I hate them and that’s why I don’t live in the hills. They are a most harmless spider. They scare the shit out of me.

As a child I used to keep lots of “bug pets” and when my kids were little I taught them to do the same.

Once I took a pet caterpillar along with my dog on a trip to the veterinarian. I was concerned it had stopped eating (I guess I never made the connection of caterpillar to butterfly).

A few years ago while we were cleaning out the garage we had to move the freezer. Suddenly we noticed the largest black widow we’d ever seen-or heard of. It had been living in the compressor, eating who knows what. It was dragging its enormous abdomen across the concrete. It was quite interesting, because apparently black widows don’t crawl very easily, or maybe they don’t crawl easily when they have a big ol’ belly to haul, preferring to sling themselves along upside down in webs they build.
I scooped it up in a glass jar, poked a couple of holes in the lid, and kept it as a pet. It freaked my family out, and even though it promptly built a web, they refused to let me feed it. One day the jar just disappeared. Nobody will own up to what happened to it.

I learned to not be afraid of spiders from a former member of Fluther. Spiders are more helpful than harmful. They eat pests that may spread harmful diseases, like mosquitos. Mosquitos are deadlier than spiders.

I don’t freak out now when I see a spider in my house. I grab a cup and toss it outside.

^I see my mistake but it’s too late to edit.

Spiders have hearts!

I’m not sure if this is true or not, and I would appreciate your opinion on it as you are the resident Spider Maven:

Our former U. S. Attorney General, Janet Reno, had quite a mom. Jane Wood Wallace, was a journalist for the Miami Herald who had worked her way off the society pages, reporting on the latest doings of the Miami Lady’s Garden Club and such, into investigative reporting on Florida politics, corruption, and the licentious destruction of the Everglades by South Florida developers. She was best friends with the famous early suffragette, conservationist, and Everglades ecologist Marjory Stoneman Douglass (River of Grass), who was many years her senior.

Ms. Wallace never missed an opportunity to write of the Glades, the importance of it’s riparian ecology to the rest of the continent, it’s wildlife, it‘s people, the politics of sprawl and development and the effects thereof. She was one of the few white people and the only woman to be allowed into the Kiva during the annual Corn Dance, when the male Seminole leadership sequestered themselves in a traditional enclosure, drank a viscous bitter, black, hallucinogenic liquid and… had visions, I suppose.

Anyway, she was quite a lady and revered among the Seminoles (more properly known as the Miccosukee) of the Glades. She was invited into their chickees and reported on them in the Miami Herald on a regular basis, from the 1930’s on, in an effort to humanize them for her readership in hopes of saving them from genocidal urban sprawl.

One of the things she reported on was that in each chickee (a kind of wall-less, open-air, post-and-beam, grass-topped shelter, a kind of tiki hut—the traditional habitat of the Miccosukees.) there was a family spider. This spider kept the other spider and insect population down around the chickee. One day, while on a visit to a family in their chickee, she saw a spider and killed it with her shoe, to great consternation of the family.

Have you ever heard of this before among aboriginal people? The family spider? If so, what kind of Everglade spider would that be?

Anyway, if true, it is an excellent example of a symbiotic relationship between man and spider. Cool. Or it may have been that Ms. Wallace was just pulling our legs for a great story. What’s your take on this?

Oh, yeah. A good friend, a specialist in all things Arachnida, informed me recently that a spider’s sexual organs are next to their mouths. Talk about intelligent design. The menu of possibilities is daunting.

I love spiders. I have a moth problem right now, and I have a couple of webs in the corners of my apartment. When one of my little allies scores a kill, I cheer.

I saw an amazing video the other day. The elaborate behavior of such tiny beings astounds me.

Shake Your Silk-Maker: The Dance of the Peacock Spider

Spiders on drugs

If Spiderman was really like a spider, in order to procreate, he would coat his hands in semen and try to fist mary jane.
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/arachnids/spider8.htm

Spiders, for me, fall into the live and let live category. Black widows get scooped up an deplaned outside in a garden.

I walked out he front door one day, and there was a large mantis on the walk. I caught him in a jar and took him in for the kids, who were still under 7 at the time.

Being oblivious to mantids, I thought they ate plants. After a few days of his not eating, I did a little research, went to the pet store and got a small terrarium, some branches, and a dozen crickets.

We spent the afternoon watching Fred the mantis catch and eat a half dozen crickets! And Fred lasted about four months before he turned brown and listless. It was fun watching him hunt though.

I once collected a praying mantis just before frost and turned it loose in the house. I figured if it could find enough to eat to survive, ‘more power to it’. Years later, when I moved, I found the petrified carcass on the top of a curtain. Not sure how long it survived.

The only bugs I kill willingly in the house are flies, roaches and those creepy spiders that are like a little grey blob suspended by hairs. Bleh!
Oh, and house centipedes, or, as I like to refer to them, “Dustbunnies from hell.”

I had my pet tarantula “Beauregard” for 18 years. As it turns out, Beau was a female since males don’t live that long. She was quite mellow.

I recently had to relocate an enormous spider that had been spinning her nightly web under my flood light by the back door (a regular source of food for her) because she caught a juvenile hummingbird (my feeder is also by the back door). I managed to rescue him and extract him from the web, and he flew off happily.

When I was in Laos, having a gecko in your house was considered good luck (because they helped to control the venomous spider and centipede population in your domicile). They fear the venomous centipedes more than they fear snakes (I saw one crossing the trail ahead of me and it was truly astonishing).

In south Florida, which has been overrun with exotics, there is a population of wild Tokay geckos (released pets). When you walk down the street at dusk, their call sounds exactly like someone shouting Fuck you!.

Florida also suffers from an infestation of cane toads. My sister ran over one with her car one night and tossed him in the trunk – turns out, he was just fine, so she kept him as a pet and named him Thud.

I fell in love with a rhinoceros beetle that I got to hold at a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum insect house – I’d love to have one, but they’re not legal to import. I also got to hold a giant stick insect, but somehow he wasn’t nearly as charismatic.

If you squirt hairspray on a wasp it’ll be a stiff in next to no time.

When spiders inject venom in their prey, it turns their guts into soup which they suck up.
Female black widow spiders rarely eat their mate while mating.
Most spiders have eight eyes, but there are some that have 4, 6 or 10 eyes.
Praying mantises can spin their heads 180 degrees.

When I worked at Boeing I had reason to go into the “basement” often. They had the HUGEST cockroaches down there. One time I came upon one and I stamped my foot at it….and it stood up tall, turned around and faced me, no sign of fear at all. I ran away.

There’s a large variety of spiders in our backyard, and on the deck. The orb spiders love the deck are particularly busy, and construct huge (3 foot) webs which they only occupy after dark. The webs are often anchored between the clothesline and the railings on the deck. There’s another variety of large grey spider that looks particularly lethal. It sits dead center in its big web under the deck, and does so in broad daylight. Inside the house there are fast big spiders that appear on the walls and ceiling of the kitchen, but only in the dead of night, 2— 5 in the morning, and are apparently not intimidated by the bright lighting in the kitchen. I have no anxieties regarding the spiders patrolling the kitchen, except for the big question: what is it that those guys are finding to eat in my kitchen?

@Espiritus_Corvus Family Spider? Yes, we had one (actually two), right after my husband graduated from college. We had moved waaay out in the country in Southern Indiana so he could manage a Christmas tree farm. We were in a little house built on a cement slab, and the laundry room was in a small heated room inside the garage, and close to the kitchen door. It also had a sump pump because there was a very high water table. I was a very busy and harried mom with two infants, and I was always out there doing mountains of diapers and other laundry.

We had moved into the place in early spring, and as it warmed up, I began to notice an extremely large female wolf spider (probably with a 2.5 inch leg span) either poised on the faucet handles of the deep washtub style sink or sitting in the middle of the floor. I’m guessing that it had spent the winter in the sump pump, which provided moisture and attracted the occasional bug, and this explained its enormous size for early spring. This was a long time ago, but I remember it as remarkably handsome, having a typically striped wolf spider body, fairly dark in color, and legs with reddish “knees” or joints.

I didn’t mind it being there, but I had this regrettable habit of running around barefoot and forgetting to turn on the lights before I entered a room. I couldn’t count the times I ran out to that laundry room to check the wash, and pausing with one foot on the floor in the middle of the darkened room, the other suspended in midair, unsure of where to put it down.

She lived there all summer, and in spite of my self-inflicted trauma of wandering around barefoot, I became quite fond of her. It wasn’t long before we named her “Chainsaw”. (I mentioned in another post about another spider we had named Chainsaw- a female tarantula- but this lady was the first.)

About half way into the summer I noticed another wolf spider- almost as large- that had taken residence on top of the riding mower. Of course we called him “Chainsaw II”. For weeks we mowed the grass and he managed to stay on during the trip, but then one day I noticed he wasn’t there anymore. I suspect it might have been PTSD.

Wolf spiders are so named because they actually stalk their food, and don’t build webs like cobweb spiders. I noticed Chainsaw never seemed to leave that room, for It was her territory, and she was happy and well fed. Her buddy was not interested in it, for he patrolled the garage. I found it curious that I never found evidence of their meals anywhere. No discarded or dismembered insect carcasses or anything like that, just the usual late summer collection of desiccated flies that perished from lack of moisture and nutrition in a hot garage. I also noticed that in spite of living in an extremely “buggy” area, we never saw roaches in the garage or the house.

Then in late summer after her garage buddy had disappeared, we took a trip and were gone for almost a week. When we returned I was dismayed to find Chainsaw in the bottom of the laundry tub, dead. It wasn’t a week after she died that I began to find cockroaches in the garage near the door that led into the house. Chainsaw and her friend must have been eating them before they had time to get that close to the door.

That was a great story. There are plenty of wolf spiders in the Glades. Big ones. Maybe that was the spider that Wallace was referring to in the story—a spider in every chickee that was left untouched by the Miccosukees which cohabited with them. Wallace wrote that it was big as hell and scared the living shit out of her when she noticed it. She killed it with her shoe and everybody in the room fell quiet and just stared at her. It was obvious that she had committed some faux pas. She’d killed their house spider.

@Espiritus_Corvus Wolf spiders rarely climb, and so I was astonished to find ours spending long hours, even days on top of the handles of our wash tub. Did your friends’ spider live on the floor or in the walls and ceiling?

@snowberry I have very little data on this as it all comes from a series of stories written by a newspaper woman back in the 1930’s about the annual Miccosukee Corn Dance Festival. I don’t remember her mentioning whether or not the spider surveyed it’s domain from on high. She was sitting on a grass mat talking with the family when the spider crawled across the floor in front of her. She smacked it with her shoe. Then it was explained to her that it was the house spider and that everyone had one. That’s all I know, really.

I’ve asked Miccosukees about this, but the modern Miccosukee is a rancher or businessman, and they now live in ranch-style homes or mobile homes and really don’t want to reminisce about the bad old days with a complete stranger. The whole chickee and spider thing might still be a source of embarrassment to them. Still too soon.

Or too late. A lot of these things have been lost to time. There are few people alive today that remember life in the 1930’s before FDR changed everything for them. A kid from that time would be in their late 80’s early 90’s today. Maybe the modern Miccosukee is sincere when they say they don’t know about these things.

@Espiritus_Corvus If you like reading stuff of this sort, you might enjoy My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell. His autobiography details a hilarious romp through nature when he was a boy on the island of Corfu (Greece). http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/my-family-and-other-animals-gerald-durrell/1102224349?ean=9780142004418

House spiders. I have never heard of that before! Although I have spiders in the house, and for the most part I leave them be.

I’m a bug and spider lover too. I used to live in a California Tarantula migration path where they would migrate during their breeding season in October. Every day they were everywhere and you had to be careful to not step on or drive over them.
We also have Pale Wind Scorpions, Giant Millipedes, huge root borer beetles that swarm with the first rains which is their breeding season.

The day before yesterday I stumbled across a newborn 3 inch Pacific Diamondback rattlesnake on the back patio.
A first in decades after only seeing monster adults. We did away with the poor little dude because he was on the patio but it was awesome to see inspite of having to dispatch the little viper so as not to risk the animals, or one of us getting bitten. We are keeping a sharp eye pout for his siblings, of which there could be a dozen or more nearby.

I had a neighbor who was deathly afraid of spiders. One day she called me up but all I could hear were whoops and screams. It seems she had bought some coffee table size books on spiders to try to find out what kinds were in her house. She screamed every time she turned a page!

It was sooo funny, but the fact that she had a doctorate in educational psychology made it even funnier!

I wish you were my neighbor. I hardly ever get them in the house but my sons afraid of them too. I had to ring x husband and get him to come down the hill to take care of the last one.

@trailsillustrated Aw, that’s sweet. I’d trade you for my next door neighbor with the vicious dog in a heartbeat.

A neighbor girl was afraid of spiders and all bugs until I caught a little jumping spider and told her that it was her responsibility to feed it, or it would die. Suddenly she wasn’t afraid of any bug, and was in the backyard frantically searching for victims to feed her new pet.

I [stupidly] kept birdseed in an open jardiniere on winter. We don’t use a bird feeder, but throw a scoop on the patio when needed. We started seeing moths. Then more moths. I dumped the birdseed out and lined the pot with a plastic bag. In the morning, there would be moths in the bag, but also on the ceiling and flying about.

I went on the internet and read stories about Indian meal moths hanging all over the ceiling and people purging their homes of all food without stopping the infestation. To make matters worse, I worked in a food factory that had once shut down for 3 days (major, major big deal) to exterminate for Indian meal moths. They had shown us a corrugated cardboard box with the top layer of paper peeled off, and it was full of larva, much like a bee hive. They can even chew through plastic.

I freaked, threw a bunch of stuff away, and bought Pantry Pest traps that I put around the house. I finally stopped the critters, but it was scarey.

This is a fun site I found in my search for Indian meal moths!

@ibstubro That pumps the “gross factor” right up there, doesn’t it?

Fun, though!

Here’s a new one for me. And now that I think of it, I may have seen this and not realized it. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/this-spider-s-crafty-way-of-building-web-will-scare-you-184200305.htmlot

@snowberry That’s amazing! Thanks for sharing!

Coincidentally, on the subject of this thread, I JUST rescued a HUGE, female Preying Mantis off the porch and relocated her to the grape arbor out back. Hopefully she will find her true love and eat his head after their little insect orgy. I once witnessed this firsthand at my old house. Put a male and female together on a bamboo on my deck and after copulation she decapitated him and was eating his head. haha

Male Spiders Have Better Chance of Fathering Offspring in Return for Good Gifts to Potential Female Mates!!! LOL Who knew?
http://old.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131024121929.htm
And the quality of the wrapping is important too:
http://old.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140203084020.htm

^^^ A nicely wrapped fly does it for me. lol

I could not get the links. It says they are not available.
I don’t have any cool bug stories I can think of. When I was a little girl I loved katydids a lot. We had a lot of dragonflies, because there was pond nearby. There were different sizes and colors, and whenever they’d hang out I felt like I was in a Disney movie or fairytale book.

What about you? What was your favorite bug as a kid, and what is now?

I recently found a colony of social spiders. These are a group of spiders that all live together in the same web, and are of different ages. It was pretty interesting, but they didn’t stay in that place long enough to learn more about them. I live in Texas, and my group was about as big as my two hands, no bigger. Here’s a link to social spiders in Brazil:

Forgot the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az-3RJW3s-E

@Here2_4 Favorite bug…I kind of liked ‘em all. Even the red ants in Utah that built mounds 2 feet tall. Of course, they weren’t friendly or anything, but they were interesting.

I always was fascinated with the slave making ants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave-making_ant. And I read that the formica ant isn’t suitable for ant farms because of their habit of spraying everything with formic acid when stressed. They literally gas themselves to death. (Sorry, I forget where that tidbit comes from.)

I was horrified/fascinated with giant water bugs too, but never got close enough to make an acquaintance. Do a search for “giant water bug” on YouTube to find out what I’m talking about.