As is the case with most of my animal favorites, it started out with a particularly cute and favored stuffed animal. Rocky got me hooked on Rottweilers, Geronimo got me hooked on sea turtles, and Sassy got me hooked on tarantulas. I found the tarantulalovers forum on LJ, and enjoyed learning about these remarkable little creatures.
Since then, I've discovered a renewed appreciation for spiders. Certain kinds still squick me out a little, I admit. A "regular" spider that's the same size as a large tarantula is way creepier than the tarantula for some reason. I think because the tarantula has fur, it looks cuddlier than its non-fuzzy counterpart.
Ever since adopting our stuffed spider and learning more about them, our house has been declared a "spider friendly" zone. We no longer kill spiders in our house. In fact, we go out of our way to avoid harming them, sometimes even outright moving them to safe spots (like out of the tub I'm about to wash).
Some spiders make regular appearances in set spots of our house. We name those spiders :-) When we first moved in, Sid would hang out on the tub, coming out every night like clockwork. When he passed away, we put him out in the yard to be recycled back into nature. Bruce is a very large spider who makes his home in the corners of our carport. He's a big, beautiful creature, with striped yellow legs. We haven't seen him lately, and I hope the winds and rain we've had recently didn't blow or wash him away!
And then there's Fred, our resident kitchen spider. He has a nice little web going in the corner of the window near the sink. Like Sid, he comes out like clockwork every night. I was amused to notice that when we set our clocks back last week, Fred started coming out an hour earlier. There's a creature who definitely goes by the natural ebb and flow of daylight! But... Fred is a messy little guest! After a while, his web gets a little out of control-- stringy and messy. And there are spider droppings on the countertop under his web! Every once in a while, when I'm doing dishes while Fred is away (asleep), I'll wipe up not only his messes, but older parts of his web. I figure he'll have to tear them down eventually anyway, so I help the process out a bit.
One of the reasons I like spiders so much is that they are such beneficial creatures. They keep insects (especially harmful ones) at bay. Have you heard the story about how the flooding in Pakistan forced millions of spiders to seek refuge in trees? They then spun some really spooky-looking webs around those trees. Looked gnarly, but it was a blessing for the residents, because when the waters receded and left behind stagnant pools, guess who was attracted to those pools? Yup, malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But in the areas of the "webbed trees", the mosquito population, as well as the incidence of malaria, dropped sharply. Isn't that cool!?
I once read, in the LJ forum, a girl's story about how a spider came to visit her pet tarantula. This led to a comment about how spiders seem to "know" that the homes of tarantula owners are spider-friendly, and that they are welcome there. One girl even opened her window a crack on icy cold days, to let garden spiders in so they could warm up.
Well, we only have a stuffed tarantula. But our love for spiders is still the same, and I hope they feel that. We don't mind having the little critters around. They keep to themselves, mind their own business, sometimes keep us entertained, and definitely earn their keep while staying here. Since we've been here, we have not seen a single bug inside the house! I hope the spiders are getting enough to eat! :-)
You might not want to clean up the old parts of Fred's web. I've heard that spiders frequently eat their own web when they take it down in order to reingest the protein. That way they don't have to capture more bugs to make their web, they just reuse the protein from the old web.
ReplyDeleteOooh, I did not know that! I'll leave Fred's web alone, then. Thanks for enlightening me! :-)
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