h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Rightie oh!

I live about 3 miles from heathrow airport, so its not the middle of the country but so far this evening I've had to evict no less than 5 huge spiders from my house, each one uglier, hairier and scarier than the one before.
I have no problem with nature going about its business, but spiders have no business in my kitchen, they don't do the dishes or contribute to the upkeep of the house and I do not want one as a pet, therefore, why are they in my house? I don't merrily invite myself into their webs in the height of summer so see no reason why they should invite themselves into my home.

Also, is there any particular reason for them to have that many legs?? I only have two and manage quite well, there can be no possible reason for them to actually need that many, I mean, if the fastest land mammal only needs 4, why do they need twice as many? I'll tell you my theory, they have that many just to creep you out when they go scuttling across the lino! And that weird pulsing thing they do when you put a glass over them so you can politely chuck them back outside, whats that about?? You'd think they'd be grateful that you opted to remove them politely rather than bringing your hefty human foot down on their hairy heads and braining them, but NOOOOOOOO, they have to go and start pulsing at you like you're doing something wrong!!
And why is it they only ever appear when the person who likes/doesn't mind spiders has gone to bed/out? I hate the horrible little things, they give me the serious creeps but I choose to remove them rather than squish them, mainly because I don't want to walk spider guts through my carpets.

Am I the only person that is having this issue?



Will

It's a scientifically proven fact that spiders are ucky
However, I think that the number of legs has something to do with their webs and the number of them in your house has something to do with a spider-rumor that you don't squish them, just toss them. You have to be tough with them so they don't go back to their friends and say 'Yeah, she just put me in a glass and chucked me out the front door. I did a little pulsing thing that freaked her out. Sure, go in, she won't crush you.' The alternative of course is the friends saying among themselves 'Uh oh. Bill didn't come back from her house. I don't want to go in there'.

Hope this helps

I had dream about them last night

Not the big, fat kind, but the big, long legged, little bodied kind.
Loads of them, running amok.

The spiders are there because the flies are there. The big leggy ones are a breed called "house spiders". They've evolved to live in houses. Well, houses haven't been around long enough to have affected spider evolution, but they've evolved to live in house-like places. There won't be so many of them in about 3 weeks when all the flies have gone due to the cold weather.

You can buy gizmos for picking up spiders at the end of a long arm so that you don't have to get too close to them. That way you don't have to keep track of which glasses are clean and which have had spiders in them.

Why do they have so many legs? I don't think it is anything to do with the number of legs. Centipedes have between 30 and 100 legs and are very fast, but millipedes have hundreds and they are slow. I think it is just because all arthropods have loads of legs.

You know you've got a big beasty when you can hear it run accross the floor..shudder..
I have got loads of garden spiders.
Now I dont mind them at the begining of the season when they are nice and small and almost cute, but they grow at an alarming speed, and now rather than having little webs here and there, I've got flipping webs right accross the garden, with the ocupant, its body the size of a marble, sitting in the middle grining at me.
Its like living in that Gary Larson cartoon with the web across the bottom of a kiddies slide "if we pull this of we'll eat like kings'.
I go out the house maddly waving a fluffy duster on a stick infront of me so I dont walk into the web, or even worse the owner.God knows what the neighbours think...tho interestingly both neighbours have got their houses up for sale....

I reckon that as the nights grow cooler, spiders and other insects gravitate towards our houses. The bricks will have absorbed heat during the day and will remain warmer than the air temperature for a few hours.

While they're crawling all over the outside of our houses, they will inevitably find their way in through open windows, airbricks, roof tiles etc. I suggest you minimise their opportunities to do this by closing windows & plugging draughty gaps.

Do not kill spiders call animal control if they are that big.


Will AKA LW

Spiders are lovely, well UK ones anyway.

They have 8 legs because nearly all animals are seymetrical and arachnids happen to have 4 sided symetry.

Spiders just have a bad press they do help with house work as spiders webs catch dust. Tiny spiders called house dust mites eat dead skincells which are a major cause of dust.

Spiders are apparentrly getting bigger probably due to climate change but this is cool as long as they dont start catching and eating pets.

They probably dont like being trpped in an upturned tumbler and chucked out side for the very same reasons you or I might not find it an entirely groovy situation.

vive la

one love

Agreed spiders are amonge the oldest aracnics on the planet and are older than insects in geological terms

I don't mind spiders, as long as they are not in my bed

I don't know if it was coincidence, but a few years ago when new houses were being built a stones throw away from where I live, I seemed to get a lot of big spiders indoors, mainly on the landing ceiling at the top of the stairs, this lasted for a couple of months, I'd catch them and put them outside, a day or two later more would be up there. I now have draft excluder, the brush type, fitted around my loft door, and have had no spiders in that area of the house since, though I can't see spiders would have much trouble crawling through it, it was put there to stop the draft.

I won't deliberately kill any as I have this strange superstition that they will come back and haunt me, with those 8 invisible legs crawling over my skin.


Emmily

Corrcetion;

I now have draft excluder, the brush type, fitted upside-down around my loft door,

I like spiders my wife and stepdaughter hate them....... my wife hoovers them up or puts a class over them until my carer arrives to put it outside for her

My wife and one daughter hate spiders, while I and the other daughter don't mind them. I can pick even the biggest ones up in my hand. The large spiders around here have bodies about 8 mm long and a 'leg-span' of about 40 mm.

Having said that, when a spider climbed out of the cornflakes packet and came straight at me during breakfast, I moved fairly fast!

Serves you right for interrupting his breakfast

He'd have probably been a bit friendlier if you'd left him to finish his coffee in peace

Jodan: I tried squishing one but that didn't stop his mates coming in for revenge and they were the huge and scary ones!!! I tried setting the cat on them but she picked one up in her mouth and it wiggled so she dropped it and ran away only to return and stand on it, which made it all wiggly and she hid for the rest of the night. Maybe I need a braver cat!?! I can't win, I evict them nicely and they come back, I kill one and the 'heavies' come round.

Gnomon: I have no flies in my house, I get the odd one or two in the summer but that's it. I also have no webs, so they aren't coming for the snacks.
As far as 'house spiders' go, I've said to all my firends about how many spiders I've had and they've hardly had any so Im thinking this is a new breed; 'Black-Eyed Girl's house spiders' since they only seem to be coming into my house. The walls here are pretty thin and my neighbour screams the street down if she sees one and there's been no screaming so they only appear to be coming in here.
I don't worry about the clean glass/spider glass issue. I have a plastic tumbler next to me with SPIDER written clearly across it so that I dont end up accidently drinking from a spidery glass.

Madbeachcomber: We had one that was that huge the other day. We were all sat in the living room and we heard it stomping across the kitchen floor, it may have been a little more discreet had it not been wearing my boots at the time! We nearly threw a saddle on its back and opened a rodeo.

Icy North: Beleive me, all the windows are firmly closed and since we had new windows and doors, there are no gaps. I even put the plugs in the sinks and bath as most of the fuzzy little beggars seem to emerge from the bathroom, even that doesn't deter them!!!

Blickybadger: If spiders do the dusting, then mine are hopeless!! All they do here is run around on the kitchen floor and then vanish until that moment when you're minding your business and doing your business and then it sits there watching me and everytime I move they try and run at me, but I worked that one out and they only did it when I had bare feet so now I keep my trainers on until I go to bed and they leave me to pee in peace.
If I had a choice about being trapped in a tumbler for a few moments and released nicely into the outside world, or stomped on by my huge people foot, then I'd choose to go back outside. I agree its not the most pleasant of experiences but at least they get to go back to their partners and their 400 kids at the end of the day! Im trying to do my bit to keep spider families together and they're making it difficult.

Emmily: You know, I don't think I've ever seem a spider in or around my loft hatch. Thats weird. Mine are always in the kitchen on bathroom, or more recently, running in front of the tv and demanding to change the channel. Its a cheek is what that is!

Gnomon: (re: above post) Oh my god, I'd have died, its just like a scene from Arachnaphobia! That's given me yet another perfect reason to not eat breakfast! Its one thing to put marshmallows in your cereal but spiders... well thats a bit much!

With any luck, they will all go and invade my neighbours houses from now on and leave me alone. Im off to make a polite little sign for them saying; "No spiders, violators will be squished!" I just hope they can read english, they understand when you tell them if you don't go away you'll stomp them, so lets just hope that works! Oooooh, maybe I could get a spider whisperer.

Will

I had 2 in the bath the other day They both sat there staring at me with all those eyes!! Why do they need so many eyes!! Its because they can look more fierce and frightening!! It works too They were small compared to the one i had in my bath last year, it was big enough to feed a family of four! I don't like spiders and they know it, they deliberately charge at me, just to freak me out. I don't have anyone to catch them....so i stomp on them Its not a nice option, but i can't relax knowing there is an eight legged Linford Christie laying in wait under the settee or under the bed

Every year we have a period of about 3 weeks during which the most *enormous* house spiders appear in the house. This year it started on 22 August; in 2002 it started on 4 August (although that may have been a freak incident); most years it's around about 1 September. And then after three weeks of gibbering terror on my part, we don't get any more.

We live in Northamptonshire and it strikes me that if the enormous spider season has now started near Heathrow, that's an indication of how the change of season varies through the UK. When does the enormous spider season start in Scotland?

What really freaks me about spiders is the way that they Appear. The 2002 one arrived in the middle of the top floor of the house, about as far as you can get from a window in our home. It was so huge that my husband had to knock it into a wastepaper basket, not a glass, to get rid of it. Nobody had seen it come into the house or make its way to the place where we first noticed it - and my peripheral vision is exceptionally good at identifying large spiders. So how did it get there?

I reckon on an average of one per room over the three weeks, but this year we got tough and started squishing them, and had only 4 in total, which suggests that in previous years it was the same spiders coming back in (although obviously I can't be certain of this without tagging them somehow). They were definitely bigger this year, though - I have a theory that the size of the spiders each year is in some way linked to the numbers of wasps which precede them, and as there were No Wasps At All this year, so the spiders grew to previously unheard-of sizes. No scientific proof for this, of course, and no idea of what might cause it - just an observation.

I have absolutely no compunction about killing them - I know that my fear is completely unreasonable (it's directly traceable to the Doctor Who story of the early 70s, and it's possible that I've been particularly hysterical this year because I watched the video for the first time this summer) but they terrify me. Squishing is the most effective method (a large booked dropped from a height works well). On no account use a spray, because all that happens is that you get a snow-white spider running around for about 20 minutes before it finally dies. You can use the wrong end of the spray can to bash a spider, but be aware that if you do this, the not-completely-dead spider tends to bounce upwards to your face, which is not a useful hysteria-control method.

If you look in an old copy of the Guinness Book of Records (1975 to about 1985, I think) you will see that the largest spider in Britain was trapped in a garage in Wokingham, Berkshire, but later escaped. That was *my* garage - apparently my mum picked up the spider to put it outside and said, "This is a big one - I need two hands!" so Dad got her to put it down again while he measured it. 5.4" sticks in the mind for some reason. Big bugger, anyway.

Sleep well ...

Mol
(keeping her feet off the floor, just in case)

My mother (bless her, stupid woman!!) decided the best thing to do withone we had in the bathroom was to spray it with air freshner!! Generally a stupid idea made even more so by the fact I was in the bath at the time!!! It sprinted across the top of the door and eyed up the bath.... yes, little naked me all terrified and about to be leapt on by huge strawberry smelling spider!
I was out the bath faster than Wile E Coyote after roadrunner, kinda hockey smashed mother into the door to try and get out and then ran around the house yelling for help.... there was none.
Then, huge spider just vanished! We searched for it for an hour and then figured it had run away - not that anyone could blame it, I mean me flashing at it and being made all strawberry-smelling - well, it turned up but we heard and smeltit coming and all freaked out as it marched into the lounge and proceeded to tried and climb on my leg! I stomped on it twice and it didn't die so I ran away and found a brave man to remove it.

I wish I knew how they just appear, one minute no spider, next minute huge hairy beast glaring at you. Its just not right!!



Will