in honor of our eightlegged overlord and my husband’s gentle ways, i ain’t killin’ as many spiders as i could. our house has long-bodied cellar spiders living under every houseplant, wolf spiders of some sort living in all the walls, dropping into light fixtures where they can starve to death. weird black spiders that like to hang out where the wall meets the ceiling roughly two feet from the nearest door. a spider smaller than a sesame seed that hangs out on the houseplants over the sink.
who are all these motherfuckers? i dunno. just found out the name of long-bodied cellar spiders a few weeks ago and am writing this post to commemorate.
those last guys, they make very stereotypical webs, and are fairly persistent at it. i didn’t know who was making the webs under the little tables that hold various houseplants, but one day i saw a tiny bodied guy with insanely long limbs wobblin around in the shadows there, weaving.
the spider from that area was pretty industrious because we kept accidentally knocking down this runner he’d sent out to a plant light that’s clamped to the coffee table, and he’d rebuild it overnight. eventually, he didn’t bother to build it as high, and at last, gave up on rebuilding altogether. slacker.
or maybe they have very short life expectancies. i’m a not spider expert.
i admit, i kill some of the wolf spiders. if you’re giant and running fast, you’re freaking me out too much. you gotta go, bro. hey, if it managed to get that big after a lifetime of cannibalism and hustling buggies, it’s probably ready to retire to the big web in the sky.
this is a greater than reasonable mercy i’m showing them, given that one literally dropped on my head around the time we were moving in. i should be on a vendetta. count your arachneed stars.
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why are all spiders guys and bros? not very gq of me. whatever.
Consider pausing next time you see a wolf spider sprinting near your space, they use that speed and size to reduce the number of cockroaches in our homes. I, for one, appreciate this service and have trained myself to pause when my instinct tells me to smash.
Likewise in our house, where I have two rules for the cellar spiders who live in a back corner of the kitchen counter:
1. stay out of sight behind the cupboards during the day;
2. eat all th.e fruit flies
I’m ok with web weavers of all sorts as long as they stay in out of the way places. Do NOT drop down toward the table when I’m eating or you’re out the house however small you are. The black ones that run around web free are a different matter, they invoke a instinctive response which I have managed to tone down over the years from a visceral scream to a yelp, and they have to go. My response hasn’t been helped by various instances of them crawling over me, including my face when I was half asleep, and my neck which I thought was just my hair tickling until when I grasped it to pull it back I felt a BODY. What the HELL spiders? Mr J used to be blase about picking them up bare-handed, but one bit him so he uses a cloth to protect his hand now; it’s not that it caused any reaction, he said it felt like a pin prick, more that he dropped the beast out of surprise so it got away and wasn’t put outside.
alan – one usually knows well if they have roaches because they can’t help but come out once in a while. fortunately, this has not happened in my condo. i’ve heard the closer you get to the tropics the more unavoidable they are. i think the only thing wolfies are eating is other spiders, supplemented by the odd silverfish, woodlouse, or earwig.
wiess – that’s the idea, they can snatch up the lil flies houseplants get.
jazz – these indignities must not be tolerated.
I live in the southwest high desert, so with much hotter summers and slightly cooler winters than the Puget Sound area. I only get a few roaches that wander through from my neighbors with dogs, get killed by the spiders, and get noticed in unused corners sucked dry with legs up. I also get a few nymphs that crawl though the drain pipes into my tub or sink, quickly drowned with a little water and sprayed window cleaner. If you live in a new development, then you may have a few years before the roaches move in, begin to multiply, and explore your home for fatty high protein fare. The more pets in the area the sooner you’ll see them because a cool climate does not override the humidity and low altitude.
i’ve lived in a lot of apartment complexes and my experience of roaches is that around here you only ever get them from direct transmission – one brought in on a value village jacket or second hand furniture, coming from a neighbor’s apartment – or from a persistent infestation that just bounced back from the last extermination attempt. i say this because the places i have lived either had them or not. unless i was in a ghetto, i didn’t get them. bedbugs were a very different issue – any given time you move, you might get them from your moving van or storage place.
i’m lucky to live in a duplex condo now. building’s like forty years old. nobody who can afford to move into the other unit is going to bring a couch full of roaches, and they just don’t seem able to get from one house to the next in the puget sound region without that. maybe because the yards are full of wolf spiders, or the nights are too cold. i don’t know, but based on forty-fivish years living here, i doubt i get them.
of the southwest, i’ve heard the reason cowboy boots are pointed is to kill roaches in corners.