Anonymous asked: To that anon: And it's not always a memorable experience. I've been bit (handling spiders a few seconds before I noticed) twice, the first time it didn't do anything and the second my hand was just tingly for a little while.
exactly, most spider bites aren’t painful or dangerous
Anonymous asked: I'm allergic to house spider bites. I've been hospitalized twice by them. Spiders bite ;-; Not all the time but they do bite ;----;
thats essentially what the article said, people tend to blame spiders for any sort of bite they don’t recognize so most of the time the “spider bite” is not from a spider, the article says that people blame them for bites more often than when they do actually bite, and that they are less likely to bite than people think, and that allergy blows
Anonymous asked: As much as I love spiders, I have to disagree that they don't bite. They may not bite often, but when they do, it's a memorable experience. Two of my friends had to have skin grafts due to Recluse bites, and another friend almost died from a bite when a spider fell off of a bush onto her when we walking down the sidewalk.
the article doesn’t say that they don’t bite at all, it simply says that often times when people say that they have been bitten by a spider, it’s something else.
A great article by a professional Arachnologist explaining that if you think you’ve ever been bitten by a spider, you are probably if not definitely mistaken, which is common knowledge to people who understand these animals.
Too bad the idea of spiders regularly biting people is so deeply ingrained in everyone else’s mind.
Seriously you could live in a house with thousands of them and never get bit in your entire life. Not once. That’s exactly the case for one family who lives in a house crawling with recluses.
See also my friend Bug Girl’s (not the same Bug Girl I’m friends with here on Tumblr, a second one!) blog post “WRONG ON THE INTERNET: BOGUS USA SPIDER CHART.”
My favorite fact she points out:
Black widow spiders are found around the United States in large populations, but literally not a single person in America has ever died from one.
It’s not even solidly proven that anyone anywhere has died from a widow.
Fear of spiders is not a natural, understandable defensive response. It is an extremely abnormal psychological quirk inexplicably widespread in just a few countries - primarily English-speaking countries - over only the past century and reinforced by our culture.
faithlucille asked: Hey what do you know about cellar spiders? I have (what appears to be) a female that's lived in my bathroom for quite a few weeks. She's got a lovely home built around the ceiling and I don't want move her because she's not bothering anyone and she keeps the fly's and escaped crickets at bay. TODAY I noticed a more slimmer spindly Cellar spider with a BIG leg-span. A male? Do you know anything about their breeding behavior?
It might be a male, the female will mate only with one male while the male may mate with several females, they have been observed to hang around the female and even protecting the eggs, the males and females look almost identical (even though most spiders have very different appearances between the sexes), it may also be another female that happens to look different and is looking for a new spot to live :)
Goliath Bird-Eating Tarantula
extraintrovert asked: You have no idea how happy I am that I've found this blog.
Viciria sp. female jumping spider with her precious eggs.
