Tag: arachnaohobics

Teeny little money spinners

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If a money spider lands on you then ‘gold will rain down from heaven’. They build horizontal webs, like these, which look like silky hammocks.


I am beginning to wonder if I should apologise for reintroducing spiders to this column, a subject with which some of you might be getting fed up, especially if you are phobic of them. I implore the phobics among you to think of this as my way of offering you complimentary aversion therapy, which embraces the theory that the more I expose you to your worst fear, the less of a fear it becomes. Is it working yet?

Today though, you may have noticed that I have avoided subjecting you to any alarming pictures and am going to talk about a much less scary arachnid. I was prompted to write about this thanks to reader Billy Goode who quoted a bit of folklore to me: “If you ever find a money spider you put it in your hair for good luck. I was taught that by my grandad and have been doing it for 30 years.”

Now, the idea of putting a spider in your hair might be every arachnophobe’s Room 101, but I would like to know if these really teeny tiny weeny things spark the same kind of fear in you as their larger counterparts. To be honest, even the prospect of becoming rich would not tempt me to put one in my hair, but the superstition connected to money spiders pops to the front of my mind whenever I see one: if one lands on you, then it will bring you good luck of the financial variety, so you have to treat them with respect and kindness. Do otherwise, then fiscal ruin will head your way.

Different parts of the country have different rituals associated with this spider, which is also known as the money spinner. Some of these contradict the advice to do it no harm, including placing it in your pocket, tossing it over your shoulder or, bizarrely, eating it! In Berkshire, you are advised that if one lands on you, you have to pick it up by the silky strand upon which it drifted in, twirl it round your head three times, then deposit it back upon your clothes in the same spot it first landed.

According to my folklore bible, Steve Roud’s Guide to Superstitions, the first written account of this kind of belief appears in the 16th century poet and diarist Thomas Nashe’s book, Terrors of the Night (1594), although it is likely to have been around for much longer than that. Nashe writes: “If a spinner creep upon him he shall have gold rain down from heaven.”

Money spiders are less than 5mm long and belong to the Linyphiidae family which makes up about 40% of our spider population with more than 270 species. It is the shiny black ones, Erigone, that are particularly associated with luck thanks to their way of getting about which is known as ‘ballooning.’ They launch a silky strand into the ether which catches on the breeze, hoisting them heavenwards from the ground. At certain times of year, there are thousands upon thousands of these tiny creatures ‘flying’ through the air as they move to new ground, landing in whichever destination the prevailing wind sees fit, often your hair.

You will be able to see evidence of money spinner dwellings in your garden, particularly on dewy autumnal mornings. Look out for dozens of little silky hammocks decorating the exterior of hedges and shrubs. These are made by spiders weaving horizontal layers of web, suspended above and below by silk guide ropes. Unsuspecting prey trip over these barely visible ropes like drunk people on a campsite, propelling them into the sticky hammock where they are at the mercy of the hungry predator. I must admit, I always feel a pang of pity whenever I see a creature caught in a web, for the more they struggle, the more trapped they become, and as such their fate is inevitable. It’s like an entomological horror film.

It’s quite amazing to think that people like Billy and me are perpetuating a superstition that has been around for at least 500 years, even though in all the time I have been doing it, the most I have ever won on the lottery is £80. I suppose, though, by 16th century standards that is the equivalent of winning the jackpot.

I’d love to hear from you about your stories, memories, opinions and ideas for columns. Use the ‘Contact’ button on the top right of this page to get in touch.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 4th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 2nd Oct  2024.

No Leg to Stand On

 

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Daddy longlegs’ webs are rather scruffy compared to their scarier home-dwelling counterparts. But these harmless creatures can help keep the scarier spiders at bay

 

I hope you weren’t too disturbed by my column about house spiders last week. It’s funny how seeing just a picture of an eight-legged arachnid produces a physical shudder in many of us, so apologies for doing it again this week.

Our reactions go back to our evolutionary ‘fight or flight’ response. When we are under threat, our brain floods our body with the stress hormone adrenaline signalling to our muscles prepare to either run away or stay and fight. It’s estimated that around 4% of us fear spiders and as a phobia it comes second only to snakes. If we are truly phobic it means that we are fearful to the point of irrationality, and the terror we experience far outweighs the actual danger posed by the object of the fear.

If you are worried about house spiders then I suggest you rein in your instinct to clean because they have a natural predator that loves nothing more than setting up home in the corner of your living room. The trouble is though (especially for arachnophobes), this helpful predator is yet another spider. In its defence it’s much less scary and, unlike the house spider, does not whizz alarmingly across your floor at the rate of half a metre a second.

This creature is a friend to all housework-shy humans, a regular resident of neglected corners, cupboards and attics and a weird-shaped spindly thing, the lazy old daddy longlegs. Compared to the clean and ordered webs built by swotty old regular spiders, the slovenly daddy longlegs’ home is a shambles and described as ‘untidy’ and ‘without great design’ by the Natural History Museum. I can relate to that, because it reminds me of my side of my dishevelled university room compared to that of my unnaturally tidy roommate.

The light brown DLL (how I will refer to the daddy longlegs from now on because it is too much effort to type it out fully) is characterised by its long dark two-part body of abdomen and paler thorax (head end) to which are attached its eight ridiculously long skinny legs. It originated in the Sub-Tropics and after hitching a lift on an England-bound boat, was first documented in the south of the UK in 1864. Once it worked out that to survive our much chillier climate it had to stay indoors, it dared to venture up north and is now common all over the country.

It relies on its web to do the heavy lifting where dinner is concerned, but if that fails, it will get off its idle backside to hunt food, which includes – arachnophobes take note – other spiders. In the entomological version of analysing the rubbish left outside MacDonalds, someone in Hampshire decided to count all the food waste discarded by the slothful DLL in the webs found in his garden shed. He discovered that of the 102 bits of leftover critter, 63 belonged to house spiders, six were DLLs, and the rest were mainly other spiders. How the DLL loves a spider-flavoured meal, even if it is their own sister.

There are a couple of other minibeasts that we also refer to as ‘daddy longlegs’, but they are distinctly different. You will likely have seen the harvestman in your garden, which from a distance looks very much like our DLL but is not actually a spider. Found outside among vegetation rather than indoors in webs, it has a teeny tiny bulbous single body and six long wispy legs. The other is the crane fly, that lanky-legged winged thing that looks like a giant mosquito and has a habit of bobbing into your room late at night to flap annoyingly round your lampshade. It may be the most stupid of creatures but its (literal) saving grace is that if it gets trapped by its dangly legs, they simply pop off and it bobs away again, unperturbed by the fact it is a leg or two lighter.

In conclusion, if you hate house spiders but can cope with the odd messy web of the slothful DLL, then perhaps you should welcome it into your home as your ally rather than your enemy.

But my educational takeaway from this column is that I now have a valid excuse to do even less dusting than I do already.

I’d love to hear from you about your stories, memories, opinions and ideas for columns. Use the ‘Contact’ button on the top right of this page to get in touch.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 20th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 18th Sept  2024.