I found this sitting on my dining room floor!
Luckily it was calm and I was able to trap it under a plastic cup and slide an envelope under that to take it outside.
Here’s my real photos; it definitely looked like a BW but I wasn’t sure until I got a view of her underside.
(Weird fact - a lot of artists depict them with the hourglass on top, but that’s wrong.
I feel lucky that it was so easy to catch and that I saw it before my cat did.
I just hope it doesn’t have a nest somewhere with a bunch if babies or eggs waiting to hatch.
@cengland0@stinks
Nah - it’s okay outside, far from my house.
I appreciate spiders, just not inside my space.
Plus I hate the mess when you squoosh things - although I do swat flies, mosquitoes and clothes moths, and put out ant traps if I have to.
The abdomen gets a little squished/wrinkly/dull looking after they lay eggs so if she was big, fat, plump and shiny, she hasn’t made an egg sac recently.
@cengland0@Kyeh hard to say if she’s getting ready without observing behavior. They do recover after laying eggs and will look nice and healthy a few weeks after laying and may not lay again for months. But, by the time that happens, the eggs would’ve hatched already (~20 days or so).
@Kyeh I catch any bugs I find in (under) a plastic cup by sliding a paper under it and release it outside also-don’t feel right killing one of god’s creatures just because it ended up in the wrong place.
@Felton10 I do for almost all critters, but the ones that attack me, like mosquitoes, or destroy stuff, like clothes moths - I figure they are getting the Darwin award for annoying me.
Coincidentally there’s a thread on Nextdoor right now about clothes moths and how to deal with them and someone just made what I thought was a particularly dumb comment; they said “Heaven forbid we learn to actually live with bugs and appreciate them for whatever they are.”
Uh, sorry - I’m never gonna appreciate mosquitoes or clothes moths, nope!
@k4evryng Thanks! There’s different kinds of brave, and I just don’t happen to be that afraid of spiders and snakes, but I’d be happy to never see a crocodile or alligator! Also I think scorpions are really scary though I’ve never seen one in real life.
@k4evryng@Kyeh Scorpions are hard to avoid in some parts of Texas, especially west Texas, even indoors. My experience is that their sting is comparable to that of a yellow jacket, fairly painful but nowhere near deadly (assuming you’re not particularly allergic to them).
If I HAD to make a choice, I’d prefer to be bit by a tarantula.
Watch where you step or put your hands outdoors.
Once while stationed in Abilene, I put my foot in my issue chukka boot and got stung through my sock. Didn’t see the bugger hiding in there.
Their demeanor is similar to that of snakes: First, if disturbed, they’ll try to get away, but will easily get defensively aggressive.
My daughter had one as a pet for over 2 years…they’re actually very timid and you pretty much have to squish the hell out of them to get them to bite you. They just want to find nice and quiet place to eat some bugs.
@Kyeh Yeah! We found it outside after landlord had the properly treated prior to move in…she was all sorts of derpy and struggling…clearly affected by the pesticide…we felt bad.
Kiddo put it in a small critter cage with some water and wingless flies initially just to help it get better and it kinda just took off from there.
She made it over 2 and a half years, laid many egg sacs and was def a fun conversation starter for guests as she was very clearly on display on a shelf between the livingroom/kitchen.
It was a really fun thing to experience with the kiddo, but, no way I was going to let anything hatch. We’d give her a few days with a sac after she laid it, ensure she ate and drank, and then we’d remove it and destroy it (literally, with fire, lolol).
No way I was risking anything hatching…they’re waaaay too small to be contained in anything with air holes!
After the first one, I learned Charlotte’s Web was bullshit (childhood memories crushed!) as I expected her to die shortly after…nope. She laid many, many egg sacs throughout those 2 years.
@Kyeh@PHRoG
I find Charlotte’s Web much easier to keep in perspective… if I imagine Wilbur’s and the titular spider’s roles reversed. Not in circumstances… but in SCALE. In SIZE.
The farmer sidles into his barn… wringing his hat in the quintessential “ay! Banditos raided the village!” fashion as he edges along the outer wall towards what’s left of his livestock. His furtive glances are drawn, inexorably, to the 250 lb blob of inky blackness, seemingly anchored to the junction of wall and ceiling joist.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he tries to make his way across the web-covered space, trying not to notice the cocoons dangling above him, some as large as wheelbarrows. His hand comes up unconsciously to whisk aside his flyaway combover, and as it does his sleeve brushes a cable like strand of silk.
In a flash, she stands before him, limbs spread wide, fanged mandibles dripping a foul ichor he knows will reduce him to a liquid pulp. But… she does not lunge. Only… stares.
“H-hi Charlotte!” he stammers, trying to affect nonchalance. “H-heh. Not hungry today? Had an early supper? What was on the menu? Moths have been mighty big this year.”
Silently, mechanically, the arachnid shifted her stance to reveal what the farmer had failed to see before. There, before him, glistening in the strands, hung the macabre answer to his question. What had sated the nightmare’s insatiable appetite this day?
@xobzoo if I recall correctly, once they’ve mated, it can be used to fertilize multiple egg sacs over time…I’m sure at some point, they wasn’t really any risk of them being fertilized. But, I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk it.
While there was absolutely no say she could get out of the critter cage, the slits in the lid were definitely big enough for a male to make its way in there if it had found it’s way into the house.
Fire, in my mind, was the only certainty I had I wasn’t going to end up waking up to a scene out of the movie Arachnophobia!
@Kyeh Not at all! I’m simply saying that if spiders were the size of pigs, we’d all see them for the horrifying, alien creatures that they are.
Interesting fact: spiders are actually hydraulic (this is true). They only have flexor muscles, which allow their legs to curl in; they extend them outward by means of exerting hydraulic pressure. When a spider wants to straighten its legs to move, the prosoma section (where its legs attach to its body) ejects fluid into the legs, pushing them out straight. Valves in the spider’s body open and shut, accommodating the limb it’s trying to move.
This is why they move in such disquieting bursts of speed, then need to pause (they’re repressurizing). This is also why, when they die, and that active pressurization can no longer be held, their legs curl in on themselves.
So, to be clear: this is a creature that has remained largely unchanged since the Triassic period, that moves via hydraulic valves, that traps and stores its prey to later devour, while its still alive, by plunging fangs in and injecting a venom that liquifies its victims’ internal organs (that they might be sucked out), that can walk on virtually any surface, and some of which are poisonous enough the kill an adult human in less than 30 seconds.
Why on EARTH would I need to “reimagine” them as horrors? They come with it built in!
@mediocratic Well, I meant reimagining the books; Charlotte’s web does paint a pretty sentimental view of spiders, admittedly.
I didn’t know that about the hydraulic joints, that’s fascinating!
@Kyeh Well you are probably in luck then as after she shared two with me I presumed she maybe wanted spider for dinner. She told me, “Spider no good mom. In this country we have chicken.”.
@phendrick That would be cooking the spider. The spider can go barbecue outside if it wants but will need to provide everything to do it itself plus needs to do it itself.
@Kyeh I actually don’t see anything about that in the article. Really even black windows shouldn’t be fatal to an adult. It’s kind of an invasive species thing.
News people being what they are they are may all overreact to a science study. I just thought it was interesting and I’ve never seen a real black widow before so thanks for that lol
@unksol Yeah, I think the headline was definitely written in a sensational way: “Black widows battle their even deadlier cousins in a brutal spider war”
Deadlier to other spiders, is what it sounds like.
@Kyeh@unksol yeah, they’re not really deadly at all…the exception being other underlying health conditions.
Their venom is more of neurotoxin that has an effect on the body as a whole Vs., say, a brown recluse where most of the pain/damage is focused around the bite itself.
There’s an absolutely bonkers dude (to me anyway) on YouTube that decided his rise to popularity is to do videos about getting bit by all the dangerous shit he can find.
He did both the brown recluse and black widow about 3 years ago to prove they’re not really deadly and that they’re not prone to bite people…which, he did.
However, the all over pain from the black widow was so bad, he legit called off his crusade of being bitten by all the things while the brown recluse was just irritating. The widow bite just absolutely wrecked him.
(spoiler alert, it didn’t last…he’s back at it).
Definitely suggest watching the two videos if you have the time…super interesting to watch!!
@Kyeh@unksol to be fair, it’s not graphic at all and he’s a very well spoken dude who goes to great lengths to explain things.
What I found most enlightening was how hard it was for him to get them to finally bite him. You could tell they were far more inclined to just get away then to bite.
@PHRoG@unksol Well, that’s good to know. I have paper wasps around my yard and they seem like that too, really not interested in stinging. Yellow jackets though, I wouldn’t trust them at all.
@Kyeh@unksol looks like I put the wrong link for the widow bite above…that’s a short version and doesn’t include the full experience, here’s the full version:
@Kyeh@PHRoG@unksol Yellow jackets… OMG. Twice I was hiking and kicked up a nest. While all of us scattered, generally 3 get stung - the person who disturbed the nest, the person in front of them and the person behind. Maybe more would but everyone takes off running. Having 10 or 15 stings is just so much fun. Not.
@Kyeh@PHRoG@unksol Too right- I developed anaphylaxis after an incident when I was 18, when a yellow jacket flew into my shirt while I riding my dad’s Honda Express scooter.
By the time I could get stopped and tear my shirt off, it had stung me 3 or 4 times all in the same 6" area over my shoulder blade- I saw what it was very clearly before I get it out of the shirt.
That was episode 1, but apparently they like living near me, so I have had several more despite my awareness of watching out for them, and SWMBO being my anti-yellow jacket warrior.
I now have several Epi-Pens in various vehicles, EDC bags and the house, because it seems like each time it happens, the speed of the reaction is multiplied.
They have one of the highest aggression levels of all the hymenoptera, and [un]luckily for me, they like to nest near us…
On one of my misadventures with them, they followed me for about 50 feet despite my running away as fast as my old ass could move- and then stung me 3 or 4 more times before I could get even further away.
God forbid you drive over a nest on a lawnmower…
@PHRoG@PhysAssist@unksol
Ugh - I’d be afraid to mow the yard if I had them there! A friend of mine had a nest in his front yard and tried pouring lots of different things down into it. He finally rigged up a shop vac and sucked them all out.
@Kyeh@PHRoG@unksol I’ve seen videos where they did that- not for me, I can’t get that close. SWMBO sprays them at dusk from a distance.
We have a farm pond with our koi living in it that everything else drains into, so this is the only pesticide we ever use…
We feel justified since without me, they’re gonna starve anyway.
@Kyeh@PHRoG@PhysAssist@unksol
Re: yellow jackets nesting in the ground. A few years back I ran over a nest while mowing. I realized it when I felt a sharp pain around my ankle and saw three yellow jackets there. I was wearing thick socks and sweatpants, so they couldn’t get good access, but my ankle was not happy. I waited until after dark when they would be back in the nest, then limped out with a bucket of hot water filled with a few spritzes of dish soap and a couple of ounces of pure peppermint oil. Also, a flashlight (to find the entrance) and a big glass bowl. The water goes in and the glass bowl gets upended over the entrance, hopefully leaving no exit spaces. If there are no buzzing vespids in the bowl the next morning, then the mixture worked. I didn’t see any living yellow jackets under the bowl, but there were a few dead ones. I removed the bowl with the intent of putting it back after dark to trap any of them that may have been away on holiday when I murdered their nestmates, but I forgot. The following morning there was a big hole there and no yellow jackets. It seems that skunks like eating yellow jackets and are fine with them being freshly washed and minty.
@Kyeh@PHRoG@PhysAssist@rockblossom@unksol Yellow jackets can be nasty, but we have three others from that family which are even worse for aggression though they are seldom as prolific in nest size. There’s a small brown and yellow type that attacks on close proximity, a large red type that attacks if it can see you from the entrance to its concealed nest, and then there are the outright murderous hornets that avoid attracting attention but respond in WMD mode if they are offended. Big and nasty. Their rep is so bad that people have made a concerted effort to wipe them out, and they are not as common as they once were.
@Kyeh “Striped skunks frequently consume insects and their most favorite insect is the yellow jacket. Skunks are immune to the yellow jacket venom and will dig up their underground nest and eat the bees as they escape.” https://tourism.oregonstate.edu/striped-skunk-mephitis-mephitis/
@Kyeh@rockblossom Hmm, skunks or yellow jackets…
There were skunks at our previous place - my dog got sprayed more than once. (Dumb dog! What a mess!) Yellow jackets were around, but didn’t cause much trouble.
No skunks at our current place () . Some years there are lots of yellow (enough to be a nuisance) and others not so much. Last year there were only a few. The traps were nearly empty.
Tough call, but I think I prefer our typical level of yellow jackets to having skunks.
@macromeh You get to choose? Neither the skunks nor the vespids allowed me a vote, so my only choice was vigilanteism. I don’t mind the skunks because they are mostly nocturnal hunters. It does get annoying in summer when one wanders by my open bedroom window, and they can carry rabies, but mostly we just don’t cross paths. Yellow jackets, on the other hand, do not make good neighbors.
I have mud daubers and black paper wasps around my house, and we peacefully coexist. Wasps and bees can recognize people by their faces, and I find it interesting when one of the paper wasps stops work, looks at me going in or out a door, then goes back to work. They will investigate random delivery people bringing a package, but they don’t do more than fly around. Red wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets can probably recognize people, but they apparently don’t care because they attack anyone getting near a nest. That’s just not neighborly.
Wasps and bees can recognize people by their faces
REALLY? That’s fantastic! You’re very knowledgeable about them. I love learning things like that. The paper wasps around here harass me when I come out on the patio where they like to construct nests along the roofline, but they don’t sting me. I respect them, just wish they’d learn to leave me alone.
I wonder if the early paper-makers got inspired by paper wasps?
Also I love bumblebees and wish more them came around.
@Kyeh It could be what you are wearing. Experts say that they see orange, yellow, green, and blue - and associate those colors with flowers and will investigate. Red and darker colors are black to them and they associate (moving) dark things with possible danger. Light colors and whites don’t seem to have any effect and are the clothes most likely to be ignored. I used to have a favorite shirt that I wore for working outside that was blue with yellow flowers. It got a lot of attention from wasps and hummingbirds! Light gray or khaki shirts are mostly ignored.
@Kyeh@macromeh@rockblossom just being cute and adorable wandering around. That pic is at least 10 years old now… I feel old. Haven’t actually seen any in the yard/field here although they are around.
It’s much harder to trip over a skunk than a wasp/hornet nest though. If you had them around and you know. Your dog was… Well a dog and let out. I guess that could be a problem.
Black widows mate in the spring and lay eggs in early summer, that then hatch in a month or so. So your spider is not likely to have a stash of unhatched eggs in your house or be from a newly hatched egg. They are solitary hunters, so she probably didn’t bring friends or family along. OTOH, if one came in … You might want to check dark corners inside cabinets and utility rooms for webs, which are just a shapeless mass:
On the Other Other Hand, harmless house spiders also build webs that are a shapeless mass, so don’t panic!
@rockblossom My house, especially the basement, has a lot of those asymmetrical cobwebs, but I’ve always assumed they were made by the wolf spiders that are always around. I guess I should be more careful around those webs!
I grew up with soul stealing arachniphobia (sp?) thanks to Mom punishing me by putting any of my toys she decided I wasn’t treating right or was being too messy with in the steel shed in the backyard. The same shed that I think, to this day, was built of some type of spider steroids that drew them like moths to a flame and grew them to nightmare inducing sizes. One summer she gave me permission to rescue my dollhouse from the spider hell and I counted, no joke, 27 black widow nests with widows of every size you can imagine. Dime size to 50 cent piece sizes. (Yes. Momma was twisted and sadistic)
About 20 years later, married with 4 kids under 6, I decided I needed to “grow up” and tame my terror. Living in Salt Lake City, come fall and colder weather, the outside spiders like moving into warmer climes. Like my garage and eventually my home. I had one drop down off of the garage door track and almost land in my hair. I avoided it and ended up trapping it and about a dozen more in individual mason jars. Through that winter and the following spring me and the kids chased flies and moths for spider food and they became our ongoing science project. My arachniphobia was adequately tamed to the point that I later owned a tarantula for several years. (Their shedding their skin is amazing!!) And our project kept the kids from getting infected with my terror to the point that my oldest kept tarantulas for a few years after she moved out on her own
@sarahsandroid That’s terrifying but ultimately wonderful - what a way to conquer your fears! I love it! @Pony has a very large tarantula collection, I believe - lots of different colors and patterns. I held one once at the Butterfly Pavilion and thought it was pretty neat.
The “trap them in a bowl and slide something under them” method also works for bats. We had trouble with them in our hospital at one time when a colony established in the area above the ceiling in the upper floor. Every now and then one would find it’s way down to ER or XRay and if you caught them and threw them outside they got back in faster than you did. I started trapping them in the ‘cool whip’ style bowl we use for stool samples when they would land on the walls or ceiling. Cover with bowl, slide a clipboard under it and put the lid (with some hole punched in it) back on it.
I would take them home at the end of my shift (after 2330) and throw them out in front of my house to take up residence in the pine forest across the street. I still see them around the streetlight in front of the house now and then.
Here’s my real photos; it definitely looked like a BW but I wasn’t sure until I got a view of her underside.
(Weird fact - a lot of artists depict them with the hourglass on top, but that’s wrong.
I feel lucky that it was so easy to catch and that I saw it before my cat did.
I just hope it doesn’t have a nest somewhere with a bunch if babies or eggs waiting to hatch.
@Kyeh if it doesn’t have a nest of babies, it probably has a mom and dad around somewhere. Goodnight, sleep tight.
@cengland0 @Kyeh
Wait, what?
Squoosh it!
@cengland0 I think it’s the mom - it was huge!
@cengland0 @stinks
Nah - it’s okay outside, far from my house.
I appreciate spiders, just not inside my space.
Plus I hate the mess when you squoosh things - although I do swat flies, mosquitoes and clothes moths, and put out ant traps if I have to.
@cengland0 @Kyeh Definitely a female. Males are tiny.
The abdomen gets a little squished/wrinkly/dull looking after they lay eggs so if she was big, fat, plump and shiny, she hasn’t made an egg sac recently.
@cengland0 @PHRoG Thanks, that’s a relief. Does that mean she’s getting ready to lay eggs???
@cengland0 @Kyeh hard to say if she’s getting ready without observing behavior. They do recover after laying eggs and will look nice and healthy a few weeks after laying and may not lay again for months. But, by the time that happens, the eggs would’ve hatched already (~20 days or so).
@cengland0 @PHRoG I see.
Well, I hope she does it outside!
@Kyeh I catch any bugs I find in (under) a plastic cup by sliding a paper under it and release it outside also-don’t feel right killing one of god’s creatures just because it ended up in the wrong place.
@Felton10 I do for almost all critters, but the ones that attack me, like mosquitoes, or destroy stuff, like clothes moths - I figure they are getting the Darwin award for annoying me.
Coincidentally there’s a thread on Nextdoor right now about clothes moths and how to deal with them and someone just made what I thought was a particularly dumb comment; they said “Heaven forbid we learn to actually live with bugs and appreciate them for whatever they are.”
Uh, sorry - I’m never gonna appreciate mosquitoes or clothes moths, nope!
@Kyeh Wow! I would have been absolutely terrified! You are much, much braver than I!
@k4evryng Thanks! There’s different kinds of brave, and I just don’t happen to be that afraid of spiders and snakes, but I’d be happy to never see a crocodile or alligator!
Also I think scorpions are really scary though I’ve never seen one in real life.
@k4evryng @Kyeh Scorpions are hard to avoid in some parts of Texas, especially west Texas, even indoors. My experience is that their sting is comparable to that of a yellow jacket, fairly painful but nowhere near deadly (assuming you’re not particularly allergic to them).
If I HAD to make a choice, I’d prefer to be bit by a tarantula.
Watch where you step or put your hands outdoors.
Once while stationed in Abilene, I put my foot in my issue chukka boot and got stung through my sock. Didn’t see the bugger hiding in there.
Their demeanor is similar to that of snakes: First, if disturbed, they’ll try to get away, but will easily get defensively aggressive.
HORRIFYING. YOU ARE VERY BRAVE!
@mossygreen Thank you!
That is way bigger than the two in my bathroom.
@yakkoTDI
Sorry I couldn’t send it to you.
@Kyeh I don’t need bigger spiders. My two could each bring a friend and still have plenty of room on the face of a dime.
@yakkoTDI
But maybe they need a parent.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!
(I just can’t)
It’s so cute!!!
My daughter had one as a pet for over 2 years…they’re actually very timid and you pretty much have to squish the hell out of them to get them to bite you. They just want to find nice and quiet place to eat some bugs.
@PHRoG Really! Well, I hope it thrives on the bugs outside.
@Kyeh Yeah! We found it outside after landlord had the properly treated prior to move in…she was all sorts of derpy and struggling…clearly affected by the pesticide…we felt bad.
Kiddo put it in a small critter cage with some water and wingless flies initially just to help it get better and it kinda just took off from there.
She made it over 2 and a half years, laid many egg sacs and was def a fun conversation starter for guests as she was very clearly on display on a shelf between the livingroom/kitchen.
@PHRoG Yikes. What did you do with the egg sacks - or babies, if you let them hatch?
(@Kyeh) @PHRoG I’m curious: And, what became of the egg sacs?
@Kyeh oh god no, we didn’t let that happen!
It was a really fun thing to experience with the kiddo, but, no way I was going to let anything hatch. We’d give her a few days with a sac after she laid it, ensure she ate and drank, and then we’d remove it and destroy it (literally, with fire, lolol).
No way I was risking anything hatching…they’re waaaay too small to be contained in anything with air holes!
After the first one, I learned Charlotte’s Web was bullshit (childhood memories crushed!) as I expected her to die shortly after…nope. She laid many, many egg sacs throughout those 2 years.
@PHRoG How many [viable] egg sacs can it make without a daddy spider?
I’m sure that’s an easy-enough question to look up, but I’m failing to come up with the right search…
@Kyeh @PHRoG
I find Charlotte’s Web much easier to keep in perspective… if I imagine Wilbur’s and the titular spider’s roles reversed. Not in circumstances… but in SCALE. In SIZE.
The farmer sidles into his barn… wringing his hat in the quintessential “ay! Banditos raided the village!” fashion as he edges along the outer wall towards what’s left of his livestock. His furtive glances are drawn, inexorably, to the 250 lb blob of inky blackness, seemingly anchored to the junction of wall and ceiling joist.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he tries to make his way across the web-covered space, trying not to notice the cocoons dangling above him, some as large as wheelbarrows. His hand comes up unconsciously to whisk aside his flyaway combover, and as it does his sleeve brushes a cable like strand of silk.
In a flash, she stands before him, limbs spread wide, fanged mandibles dripping a foul ichor he knows will reduce him to a liquid pulp. But… she does not lunge. Only… stares.
“H-hi Charlotte!” he stammers, trying to affect nonchalance. “H-heh. Not hungry today? Had an early supper? What was on the menu? Moths have been mighty big this year.”
Silently, mechanically, the arachnid shifted her stance to reveal what the farmer had failed to see before. There, before him, glistening in the strands, hung the macabre answer to his question. What had sated the nightmare’s insatiable appetite this day?
“Some. Pig.”
@mediocratic @PHRoG
Yikes - kids’ books re-imagined as horror stories?
@xobzoo if I recall correctly, once they’ve mated, it can be used to fertilize multiple egg sacs over time…I’m sure at some point, they wasn’t really any risk of them being fertilized. But, I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk it.
While there was absolutely no say she could get out of the critter cage, the slits in the lid were definitely big enough for a male to make its way in there if it had found it’s way into the house.
Fire, in my mind, was the only certainty I had I wasn’t going to end up waking up to a scene out of the movie Arachnophobia!
@Kyeh @mediocratic
/giphy whoa
@PHRoG @xobzoo I wondered about dad too:
Black widow spider lifecycle: Female black widow spiders can store sperms. They can keep these sperms safely right after their first mating and produce more than ten egg sacs without mating
https://paynepestmgmt.com/the-lifecycle-of-a-black-widow-spider/
@Kyeh @mediocratic @PHRoG Nicely done!
@Kyeh Not at all! I’m simply saying that if spiders were the size of pigs, we’d all see them for the horrifying, alien creatures that they are.
Interesting fact: spiders are actually hydraulic (this is true). They only have flexor muscles, which allow their legs to curl in; they extend them outward by means of exerting hydraulic pressure. When a spider wants to straighten its legs to move, the prosoma section (where its legs attach to its body) ejects fluid into the legs, pushing them out straight. Valves in the spider’s body open and shut, accommodating the limb it’s trying to move.
This is why they move in such disquieting bursts of speed, then need to pause (they’re repressurizing). This is also why, when they die, and that active pressurization can no longer be held, their legs curl in on themselves.
So, to be clear: this is a creature that has remained largely unchanged since the Triassic period, that moves via hydraulic valves, that traps and stores its prey to later devour, while its still alive, by plunging fangs in and injecting a venom that liquifies its victims’ internal organs (that they might be sucked out), that can walk on virtually any surface, and some of which are poisonous enough the kill an adult human in less than 30 seconds.
Why on EARTH would I need to “reimagine” them as horrors? They come with it built in!
@mediocratic Well, I meant reimagining the books; Charlotte’s web does paint a pretty sentimental view of spiders, admittedly.
I didn’t know that about the hydraulic joints, that’s fascinating!
I can share spider recipes if you’d like (courtesy of my daughter).
@Kidsandliz Too late, I let her go.
@Kidsandliz Cooking for the spider, or cooking the spider?
@Kyeh Well you are probably in luck then as after she shared two with me I presumed she maybe wanted spider for dinner. She told me, “Spider no good mom. In this country we have chicken.”.
@phendrick That would be cooking the spider. The spider can go barbecue outside if it wants but will need to provide everything to do it itself plus needs to do it itself.
@Kidsandliz Is that like the Twilight Zone episode featuring the book supplied by the “friendly” aliens titled: “How to Serve Man”?
/giphy “Serve Man”
You should nuke it from space just to be sure.
@cengland0
/giphy nuke it from orbit
@yakkoTDI
@cengland0 @yakkoTDI It’s the only way to be sure.
Odd coincidence. This study is running around making waves this week
https://www.popsci.com/environment/brown-widow-spiders-displace-black-widow/
I had some book about black windows when I was a kid but I’ve never seen one
@unksol Oh, great - even deadlier???
@Kyeh I actually don’t see anything about that in the article. Really even black windows shouldn’t be fatal to an adult. It’s kind of an invasive species thing.
News people being what they are they are may all overreact to a science study. I just thought it was interesting and I’ve never seen a real black widow before so thanks for that lol
@unksol Yeah, I think the headline was definitely written in a sensational way:
“Black widows battle their even deadlier cousins in a brutal spider war”
Deadlier to other spiders, is what it sounds like.
@Kyeh @unksol yeah, they’re not really deadly at all…the exception being other underlying health conditions.
Their venom is more of neurotoxin that has an effect on the body as a whole Vs., say, a brown recluse where most of the pain/damage is focused around the bite itself.
There’s an absolutely bonkers dude (to me anyway) on YouTube that decided his rise to popularity is to do videos about getting bit by all the dangerous shit he can find.
He did both the brown recluse and black widow about 3 years ago to prove they’re not really deadly and that they’re not prone to bite people…which, he did.
However, the all over pain from the black widow was so bad, he legit called off his crusade of being bitten by all the things while the brown recluse was just irritating. The widow bite just absolutely wrecked him.
(spoiler alert, it didn’t last…he’s back at it).
Definitely suggest watching the two videos if you have the time…super interesting to watch!!
Brown Recluse Bite
Black Widow Bite
@PHRoG @unksol Eeeeuuuwww.
Thanks, but I’ll just take your word for it.
@Kyeh @unksol
to be fair, it’s not graphic at all and he’s a very well spoken dude who goes to great lengths to explain things.
What I found most enlightening was how hard it was for him to get them to finally bite him. You could tell they were far more inclined to just get away then to bite.
@PHRoG @unksol Well, that’s good to know. I have paper wasps around my yard and they seem like that too, really not interested in stinging. Yellow jackets though, I wouldn’t trust them at all.
@Kyeh @unksol looks like I put the wrong link for the widow bite above…that’s a short version and doesn’t include the full experience, here’s the full version:
@Kyeh @unksol oh, for sure! Yellow jackets are absolutely just pure evil little bastards.
@Kyeh @PHRoG @unksol Yellow jackets… OMG. Twice I was hiking and kicked up a nest. While all of us scattered, generally 3 get stung - the person who disturbed the nest, the person in front of them and the person behind. Maybe more would but everyone takes off running. Having 10 or 15 stings is just so much fun. Not.
@unksol How do you see out of “black windows”?
@PhysAssist yea yea swypes a bitch lol. I see a lot of them after it’s to late to edit. Thought you all were going to let that one go. :p
@Kyeh @PHRoG @unksol Too right- I developed anaphylaxis after an incident when I was 18, when a yellow jacket flew into my shirt while I riding my dad’s Honda Express scooter.
By the time I could get stopped and tear my shirt off, it had stung me 3 or 4 times all in the same 6" area over my shoulder blade- I saw what it was very clearly before I get it out of the shirt.
That was episode 1, but apparently they like living near me, so I have had several more despite my awareness of watching out for them, and SWMBO being my anti-yellow jacket warrior.
I now have several Epi-Pens in various vehicles, EDC bags and the house, because it seems like each time it happens, the speed of the reaction is multiplied.
They have one of the highest aggression levels of all the hymenoptera, and [un]luckily for me, they like to nest near us…
On one of my misadventures with them, they followed me for about 50 feet despite my running away as fast as my old ass could move- and then stung me 3 or 4 more times before I could get even further away.
God forbid you drive over a nest on a lawnmower…
@unksol Sorry- it was the 2nd one that triggered my copyreader switch…
@PhysAssist lol I Was kinda expecting someone to say something. I would have.
@PHRoG @PhysAssist @unksol
Ugh - I’d be afraid to mow the yard if I had them there! A friend of mine had a nest in his front yard and tried pouring lots of different things down into it. He finally rigged up a shop vac and sucked them all out.
@Kyeh @PHRoG @unksol I’ve seen videos where they did that- not for me, I can’t get that close. SWMBO sprays them at dusk from a distance.
We have a farm pond with our koi living in it that everything else drains into, so this is the only pesticide we ever use…
We feel justified since without me, they’re gonna starve anyway.
@Kyeh @PHRoG @PhysAssist @unksol
Re: yellow jackets nesting in the ground. A few years back I ran over a nest while mowing. I realized it when I felt a sharp pain around my ankle and saw three yellow jackets there. I was wearing thick socks and sweatpants, so they couldn’t get good access, but my ankle was not happy. I waited until after dark when they would be back in the nest, then limped out with a bucket of hot water filled with a few spritzes of dish soap and a couple of ounces of pure peppermint oil. Also, a flashlight (to find the entrance) and a big glass bowl. The water goes in and the glass bowl gets upended over the entrance, hopefully leaving no exit spaces. If there are no buzzing vespids in the bowl the next morning, then the mixture worked. I didn’t see any living yellow jackets under the bowl, but there were a few dead ones. I removed the bowl with the intent of putting it back after dark to trap any of them that may have been away on holiday when I murdered their nestmates, but I forgot. The following morning there was a big hole there and no yellow jackets. It seems that skunks like eating yellow jackets and are fine with them being freshly washed and minty.
@Kyeh @PHRoG @PhysAssist @rockblossom @unksol Yellow jackets can be nasty, but we have three others from that family which are even worse for aggression though they are seldom as prolific in nest size. There’s a small brown and yellow type that attacks on close proximity, a large red type that attacks if it can see you from the entrance to its concealed nest, and then there are the outright murderous hornets that avoid attracting attention but respond in WMD mode if they are offended. Big and nasty. Their rep is so bad that people have made a concerted effort to wipe them out, and they are not as common as they once were.
@Kyeh @PHRoG @rockblossom @unksol @werehatrack Where is it that these horrors are located?
My condolences…
@PHRoG @PhysAssist @rockblossom @unksol
This did literally make me LOL but also, that’s extremely interesting - I had no idea skunks could and would eat yellowjackets!
@Kyeh
“Striped skunks frequently consume insects and their most favorite insect is the yellow jacket. Skunks are immune to the yellow jacket venom and will dig up their underground nest and eat the bees as they escape.”
https://tourism.oregonstate.edu/striped-skunk-mephitis-mephitis/
@Kyeh @rockblossom Hmm, skunks or yellow jackets…
) . Some years there are lots of yellow (enough to be a nuisance) and others not so much. Last year there were only a few. The traps were nearly empty.
There were skunks at our previous place - my dog got sprayed more than once. (Dumb dog! What a mess!) Yellow jackets were around, but didn’t cause much trouble.
No skunks at our current place (
Tough call, but I think I prefer our typical level of yellow jackets to having skunks.
@macromeh You get to choose? Neither the skunks nor the vespids allowed me a vote, so my only choice was vigilanteism. I don’t mind the skunks because they are mostly nocturnal hunters. It does get annoying in summer when one wanders by my open bedroom window, and they can carry rabies, but mostly we just don’t cross paths. Yellow jackets, on the other hand, do not make good neighbors.
I have mud daubers and black paper wasps around my house, and we peacefully coexist. Wasps and bees can recognize people by their faces, and I find it interesting when one of the paper wasps stops work, looks at me going in or out a door, then goes back to work. They will investigate random delivery people bringing a package, but they don’t do more than fly around. Red wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets can probably recognize people, but they apparently don’t care because they attack anyone getting near a nest. That’s just not neighborly.
@macromeh @rockblossom
REALLY? That’s fantastic! You’re very knowledgeable about them. I love learning things like that. The paper wasps around here harass me when I come out on the patio where they like to construct nests along the roofline, but they don’t sting me. I respect them, just wish they’d learn to leave me alone.
I wonder if the early paper-makers got inspired by paper wasps?
Also I love bumblebees and wish more them came around.
@Kyeh It could be what you are wearing. Experts say that they see orange, yellow, green, and blue - and associate those colors with flowers and will investigate. Red and darker colors are black to them and they associate (moving) dark things with possible danger. Light colors and whites don’t seem to have any effect and are the clothes most likely to be ignored. I used to have a favorite shirt that I wore for working outside that was blue with yellow flowers. It got a lot of attention from wasps and hummingbirds! Light gray or khaki shirts are mostly ignored.
@rockblossom Interesting, thanks! I’ll try wearing different colors and see if it makes a difference.
@Kyeh @macromeh @rockblossom the correct answer as far as choice is 100% skunks
@macromeh @rockblossom @unksol Are they eating wasps?
@Kyeh @macromeh @rockblossom just being cute and adorable wandering around. That pic is at least 10 years old now… I feel old. Haven’t actually seen any in the yard/field here although they are around.
It’s much harder to trip over a skunk than a wasp/hornet nest though. If you had them around and you know. Your dog was… Well a dog and let out. I guess that could be a problem.
@heartny True!
@blaineg That’s so f-ing funny!
Black widows mate in the spring and lay eggs in early summer, that then hatch in a month or so. So your spider is not likely to have a stash of unhatched eggs in your house or be from a newly hatched egg. They are solitary hunters, so she probably didn’t bring friends or family along. OTOH, if one came in … You might want to check dark corners inside cabinets and utility rooms for webs, which are just a shapeless mass:
On the Other Other Hand, harmless house spiders also build webs that are a shapeless mass, so don’t panic!
@rockblossom My house, especially the basement, has a lot of those asymmetrical cobwebs, but I’ve always assumed they were made by the wolf spiders that are always around. I guess I should be more careful around those webs!
This. Right?
@Kidsandliz YES!
@Kidsandliz That looks like my brother’s cat, kind of.
I grew up with soul stealing arachniphobia (sp?) thanks to Mom punishing me by putting any of my toys she decided I wasn’t treating right or was being too messy with in the steel shed in the backyard. The same shed that I think, to this day, was built of some type of spider steroids that drew them like moths to a flame and grew them to nightmare inducing sizes. One summer she gave me permission to rescue my dollhouse from the spider hell and I counted, no joke, 27 black widow nests with widows of every size you can imagine. Dime size to 50 cent piece sizes. (Yes. Momma was twisted and sadistic)
About 20 years later, married with 4 kids under 6, I decided I needed to “grow up” and tame my terror. Living in Salt Lake City, come fall and colder weather, the outside spiders like moving into warmer climes. Like my garage and eventually my home. I had one drop down off of the garage door track and almost land in my hair. I avoided it and ended up trapping it and about a dozen more in individual mason jars. Through that winter and the following spring me and the kids chased flies and moths for spider food and they became our ongoing science project. My arachniphobia was adequately tamed to the point that I later owned a tarantula for several years. (Their shedding their skin is amazing!!) And our project kept the kids from getting infected with my terror to the point that my oldest kept tarantulas for a few years after she moved out on her own
@sarahsandroid That’s terrifying but ultimately wonderful - what a way to conquer your fears! I love it!
@Pony has a very large tarantula collection, I believe - lots of different colors and patterns. I held one once at the Butterfly Pavilion and thought it was pretty neat.
Good on you for putting her outside instead of squishing her! Loads of folks are terrified of spiders (to say nothing of this species).
@PooltoyWolf Thanks!
I try to never squash spiders, but I prefer to have them living outdoors.
@Kyeh I remove potentially dangerous ones but tend to let the small house spiders alone, on the grounds that they eat other bugs.
@PooltoyWolf I do too, as long as they’re not running over me in bed or something! They have free reign in the basement.
The “trap them in a bowl and slide something under them” method also works for bats. We had trouble with them in our hospital at one time when a colony established in the area above the ceiling in the upper floor. Every now and then one would find it’s way down to ER or XRay and if you caught them and threw them outside they got back in faster than you did. I started trapping them in the ‘cool whip’ style bowl we use for stool samples when they would land on the walls or ceiling. Cover with bowl, slide a clipboard under it and put the lid (with some hole punched in it) back on it.
I would take them home at the end of my shift (after 2330) and throw them out in front of my house to take up residence in the pine forest across the street. I still see them around the streetlight in front of the house now and then.
@chienfou Wow! Nice to have them around to eat mosquitoes, too!
@Kyeh
exactly!