EEK!
June 25, 2009 at 6:12 am 5 comments
Yeah – it’s a blurry, crappy picture – but it’s the best I could manage after I found a spider as big as my hand crawling across the kitchen floor tonight. The fiendish beast was huge – the four inch kick at the bottom of the pantry it’s lurking next to provides scale. My gawd. I’ve eaten crabs that were smaller that.
I *know* wolf spiders aren’t poisonous. I *know* that if I could have somehow mustered the courage to capture the eight-legged horror and take it outside it would do a lovely job of pest control… but there’s something deeply and inherently evil about things with eight legs. Besides, this monster was big enough to eat the baby robins nestled under the deck [shudders]
If husband hadn’t been here to valiantly suck the diabolical beast up the vacuum cleaner – I’d have rounded up a pack of peeps and sic’d them on it.
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Dani | June 25, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I had one of those on my bedroom wall last month. Biggest spider I have ever seen. I am certain it was there to eat me. My husband dutifully responded to my gasp and high pitch yell by coming to my aid with a large cup, caught it, and took it outside. A bit freaked out I seriously considered sleeping on the couch that night, but then my husband reminded me that wolf spider eat all things creepy crawl-y including other spiders and given the size of that thing it had likely eaten every other spider in the house.
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Dorene | June 25, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I think I’ve been a grower too long — I see a spider like that and I think “No more squash bugs EVER!” and would be fending off both the dog and the cat to get it outside working.
Last year, many of my newsletter readers supposedly had the same reaction when I lead off an issue proudly annoucing that we had garter snakes actually living in the garden itself and sunning themselves on top of our black plastic hoses. it’s such an ecological trimuph, but with the EEEK! factor, that was lost on many of my readers. . .
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SmartDogs | June 25, 2009 at 5:47 pm
My eekiness extends only to 8-leggers (primarily spiders and ticks).
I love snakes and when I found a small rattler in my yard 2 years ago, just re-located in the coulee. Big bugs (i.e 6-leggers) are fascinating. Since getting the peeps, I can now even pick up grubs with my bare hands and I think that decapods are delicious.
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Sian Min | June 25, 2009 at 8:52 pm
The bigger (and uglier – tho’ this is a matter of personal taste) they are, the worse the “rap” is they have to “beat”. Just like pitbulls, rotties, etc.
My point is, spiders are such beneficial creatures, especially where I live. Without spiders we’d have even more mosquitoes, flies, ticks, etc.
Now, I’m not saying that I’d kiss one. And if I ever find one in my bedroom, I’d promptly and carefully try to bung it outdoors.
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LabRat | June 26, 2009 at 11:31 pm
I share your squeamishness with spiders, as we have those OMGWTFHUGE lycosids out here too.
Unfortunately for me, Stingray likes spiders and tends to make pets out of the ones that roam around the house. Every instinct in me WANTS to kill those big females that look like they’re wearing the pelts of the small mammals they’ve moved up, but he won’t let me.
It does help calm the screaming meemie within that I’ve never seen a black widow inside this house, and that this probably is due to the wolf spiders.