Posted on 03/05/2022 7:03:49 AM PST by Henry Cavendish
I thought everyone knew that if you kill a spider, you get seven years of bad luck.
Spiders seem to be their favorite food.
Interesting. We always have little brown house wrens making nests in the wood shed. Maybe they will discover the feast!
Is that a wood tick?
The spiders last one to two days. I gave up on stocking those.
I looked up Carolina wrens. We have the same birds here. We’ve nicknamed them no-neck wrens. Love their songs and how they Bob up and down.
Got bit by one of these nasty buggers on my side in December. Three antibiotic injections and three rounds of oral antibiotics and cleaning, ointment and bandage change twice a day up into february. Found out I was highly allergic to the adhesive on the large bandages, they set me on fire and looked as bad as the bite itself which got to the size of an Eisenhower dollar.
Looks like an orb weaver! Raised them while in Texas,
Kudzu is from Korea fwiw.
Fascinating stuff, useful for lots of things.
They weren’t that wrong bringing it here, not irredeemably.
But then again, I live a bit North of the “kudzu line” ( Mason Dixon)
That’s omg!, a Rorschach spider!
Care to share your impressions?
I’m with you on this, Hot Tabasco!
Not a wood tick! Look at the ruler next to it...it is about an inch long!
I’ll be honest with you, the first time I watched that video I almost flew off the back of my chair when that spider jumped......LOL!
Impressions...okay, here goes:
Please pray for my wife...A spider bit her on the forehead and she is now in the E.R. They said she almost died. Lucky for her, I was near and hit the spider as hard as I could with a bat right when it bit her. Thank you...thank you...I’ll be here all week!
Agh. Wrong impression! I have a thing about spiders, but I admit that one has interesting markings. I would still burn down the house if I found it INSIDE my house and not in the driveway...
I didn’t want to kill it in the driveway. I didn’t want to look at a giant smear of green, drying spider gut scum for the next few weeks...
Me too! I get itchy now just watching it!
When I was seven years old, I tried to crawl through a drainage pipe that went under a road. I could see the other side, so I thought it would be neat.
I wiggled my way in, and was about 15 feet in when I suddenly noticed the pipe was getting narrower. Next thing I knew, I couldn’t budge forward, and could only wiggle slightly backward.
I was lying on leaves, twigs and junk, arms out in front of me, and turned my head to say something to my older brother who was standing outside, when I saw that a huge cobweb and got squished all over my neck and shoulder.
And stuck right in it, was a big, huge, Daddy Longlegs. Just like the one on the Johnny Quest cartoon. Staring at me, with that single (I thought) eye.
That pipe immediately became skin-tight and I began to scream and wiggle in a most horrible fashion. Somehow, my brother wiggled in behind me, grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me out.
Next thing I knew, I was running down the middle of a residential street, screaming loudly, jumping in the air and twirling in a way that would have made a professional figure skater jealous, all the while beating my head and shoulders madly.
Every single time I glanced back, like a dog with tin cans tied to its tail, that Daddy Longlegs was still there...bouncing around, just within my field of view.
My brother got it off me, and even though I do not remember how I knew, I somehow knew that damned Daddy Longlegs was a corpse stuck in the web. It was one of my most frightening childhood experiences.
To this day, I harbor an irrational fear when I feel or see one on my body. I cannot kill them...they ARE interesting, and I find them fascinating, but...they still bring out some kind of primal fear in my gut, if even for a fleeting fraction of a second if one is on me.
Another time, I was driving down the road at night, and...a little itty bitty spider begins to lower itself from the ceiling of my car...right...in front of my nose.
So here I am, driving down a twisty New England road doing about 45 mph, at night, and I am completely fixated on this spider about three inches from the front of my face...inching slowly down towards my crotch.
I cannot take my eyes off of it for a second to look at the road. Just as I was coming to grips with the situation, doesn’t the damn thing just DROP and disappear into my lap.
I damn near wrecked my car. But I always wondered how my face looked to the spider...kind of fisheye distorted, bug eyed and crosseyed, with a great gaping black mouth slowly opening to reveal a waving uvula at the back of my throat as I yelled.
And all this isn’t because I am squeamish...I lived in the Philippines, and they had dang near every variety of bizzare huge beetle with enormous mandibles like Tiger Beetles, Rhinocerous Beetles, and the prized and rare, Ox Beetles. They had lizards, geckos, snakes, monkeys, boars, monitor lizards and God knows what else...but it was only the spiders that freaked me out.
BTW...I DO know Daddy Longlegs aren’t really spiders, and I DO know they are completely beneficial and harmless, but...still scary to me.
Parachnids for short?
Well then I want one.
Awww...it looks like the Agriopes I never see around any more.
A mama wolf spider, very beneficial arachnid.
Had you not killed her, eventually she would have died and the babies would have eaten her in order to grow up themselves.
A last, infinitely selfless, motherly act.
The babies cannot survive without her final offering of a first meal.
Bummer.
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