Tag: house spiders

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.

 

Along came two spiders

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A massive house spider on my son Jasper’s hand. He’s not squeamish at all

The herringbone pattern has featured in a few of my columns of late, most notably in relation to patterns on stones used in Yorkshire moorland cottages, and as a decoration used by clock and watchmakers. But it also features somewhere I was definitely not expecting, and I challenge you to guess where. The answer lies further down this column.

Twice in the past week I have had to call on the services of my son Jasper to rescue me from being attacked by that most venomous and deadly of creatures, the house spider. OK, they are not venomous (well, not to us) and they are not deadly (again, not to us) but I don’t know if it is a result of global warming or what, but I am convinced they are getting bigger. Every year I come across them, they seem to be more monstrous than the year before.

I know by the way they scurry across the floor that they are more scared of me than I am of them. I am after all a gazillion times bigger, and I am not too worried if they remain at a respectable distance. I just don’t like the idea of them being ON me.

Jasper has no such qualms, which is why I summon him whenever I’m confronted by the not so wee beasties. Earlier this week, one was waiting at the top of the sitting room curtains, poised to pounce on me when I walked past, and the next night, another was skulking around my bedroom floor, no doubt waiting for me to get into bed so it could creep over my face while I was asleep.

Jasper’s way of dealing with them makes me shudder. He simply catches them, usually in his naked hand, then lets them wander around his arm a bit and has a good look at them while I panic in the corner. Finally he deposits them outside. It is utterly bonkers, isn’t it? Not the letting them go, but the letting them scuttle around his arm. The curtain one was quite high up, so he used his mobile phone as an aid, and the spider crawled on top of it. He then thought it was hilarious to wave it at me before putting it outside. For the record, we never kill spiders in our house because, as everyone knows, that will make it rain (But judging by our summers, there must be plenty of people who do!).

Anyway, back to herringbone – any ideas yet?

According to the Natural History Museum, a houses spider is: ‘A large spider with a brown cephalothorax (the fused head and thorax) and a tan-coloured abdomen that often has a characteristic ‘herringbone’ pattern. Six species of this group are commonly found in homes, and you may often find them in the bath or dashing across the living room floor.’ Although I did know what a house spider looked like, I had not heard a herringbone pattern mentioned before, and thus it provides a comforting (albeit slightly tenuous) link to my previous columns.

As the seasonal temperature cools, male house spiders leave their webs to look for mates, wandering into our homes through open windows, under doors, and down chimneys, making we unsuspecting inhabitants flip out when they pop out.

If you are not too squeamish to get close to one, you will be able to see its herringbone pattern quite clearly (or maybe you’d prefer to just look a picture up on the internet). Several other species seem to enjoy cohabiting with humans, including the daddy long legs, the lace web, the zebra jumping spider, the scary-sounding false widow spider, and the brilliantly named missing sector orb web spider. False widows look like their deadlier namesakes but are harmless (although they can give a small bite). The missing sector orb web spider is so called because of the way it weaves its web. From a distance, it looks like many traditional spiral webs that you find in your garden (called the ‘orb’ style in the trade), but with a couple of sections missing. When building its web, this spider will turn back every time it gets to that sector, so it never fills it in.

So next time you find a web with a big gap, you’ll know why!

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 13th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 11th  Sept  2024.