Spiders Are Mommies Too!

October is a lovely month, with Halloween looming at the end of the month. Halloween doesn’t scare me, but some of its characters do.

No, not afraid of witches, goblins, werewolves, vampires, mummies, ghosts, etc., all those characters that pop up in miniature size looking for candy on our front porches.

What I really fear is, gulp, the spider! And spiders and spider webs seem to be in abundance on Halloween.

Arachnophobia is a fear most people suffer from, particularly women. Yep, even me I confess. But when you grow up and live in the country, surrounded by woods and fields, you sort of become used to the little eight-legged creepy crawlies. In the fall they all seem to want to come in and set up housekeeping with you. Uh, I’m not really OK with that.

More recently, one crawled into the KXMX building right here in town. Don’t know what this spider was thinking, but the dude got himself trapped in the air conditioning vent over the toilet in the women’s restroom. Well, that was a mistake.

Can you imagine what the woman sitting there thought when she heard that scrabbling around above her head, and then little pieces of dust began to fall from the vent? Uh, yeah. She ran.

And that circumstance resulted in a full-blown assault by the men in the building, who had to resort to dismantling the vent and using a vacuum cleaner to remove that dumb and doomed spider. And no woman would go in that restroom until it was proven that said spider was dead and in the vacuum cleaner bag. It was confirmed, thank goodness.

So, when I took a break on a sunny afternoon, out the back door of our KXMX building, and saw a spider sitting on the sidewalk, I thought, “Oh oh. You’re in trouble.” I must also confess that I have, number one, an insatiable curiosity about the natural world, and, number two, this thing about killing other critters. 

I don’t like it. Don’t want to do it if at all possible. There are a few exceptions. The spider in the bathtub had to go last week, and that copperhead snake under the horse hay did have to be dispatched. In my own defense I did let the garter snake escape when I mowed the lawn last Saturday.

And I saw nothing wrong with this thumbnail-sized spider on the back sidewalk. Until I looked closer. Spider seemed to have warts. Well, that was unusual. I sort of nudged spider with foot, and she dispersed. She dispersed into a 1,000 teeny tiny spiders, all smaller than a pinhead. They scattered everywhere. Oh, it dawned on me. This was a mommy spider and her offspring. I wondered if this was the kind of spider who was eaten by her offspring. So I gave mommy spider another nudge to see if she was alive, and she ran, followed by a 1,000 baby spiders. So Mom Spider lived and raised 1,000 babies on her back. Poor thing. 

Can’t imagine raising thousands. Three was bad enough!

A check on the internet suggested this may be a wolf spider and babies. But Mrs. Wolf was way too close to the back door. And entry into that back door meant 1,000 baby wolf spiders roaming KXMX, which, as discussed above, is unacceptable and opens the door to death by vacuum cleaner.

So, I herded spiders. Yes. I conducted a wolf spider roundup and tried to drive Mrs. Wolf and all her many children away from the back door. I was sort of successful. Mrs. Wolf scurried away, hauling some children on her back while others tried to follow in her eight footsteps. I could only hope she didn’t return and try to gain entrance to the building where the arachnophobes live.

It was my good deed for the day, although now that I think of it, I suspect the arachnophobes would just as soon I had stepped on Mrs. Wolf and all her offspring, leaving one-thousand-and-one less things to fear on Halloween.