Derek Cohen - check your shed...

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I don't understand the fear of something like this - small deadly spiders yes ofc, it's the fear they could kill you; but past a certain point, for me, it just becomes another animal, a wonder of the natural world. It's not as though they hunt humans is it?

I'm not a lover of spiders, I'm extremely conscious of several that live in my work area, and they are known to bite, but something that's the size of a dinner plate just becomes fascinating.

My stepmother is Australian and took my father for the first time to Oz some twenty years ago and still recounts a story of them driving down a street (dirt road in reality) near Townsville when he saw what looked like a thick black line across the road - from one side to the other, and this was a two way road. It wasn't until they got close he realized it was a dead snake - but you couldn't see the head or the end of the snake as they were under opposite buildings.

His remarks are unrepeatable.
 
I'm arachnophobic, I don't claim any logical explanation, I don't know the nature:nurture ratio, but I do know it's real.
I used to keep lizards, and kept and occasionally bred crickets to feed them. I would quite happily fish out a writhing fistful of wriggling crickets at feeding time, but when I sometimes found a penny sized spider among them I would jettison the bugs and spalt my pants.
Not happy about it but I can deal with it. If I'm in their space they live, if they're in my space they don't.
 
My workshop is in my concrete garage. It's a big one and solidly built many years ago. For many years, while my wife was alive and the kids were home it was a general dump similar to those hoarder programmes you see on TV. It was head-high full of cr*p from front to back. Fast forward 20 years and I'm a widower, the kids have left home, and two years ago I retired.

It took many trips to the dump and several months worth of filling the recycling bin with cardboard and I finally I had an empty garage, except for HUNDREDS of spiders. The little (and not so little) b*ggers were everywhere. I'm lucky to have a nice big garden and they probably migrated over the years in there each autumn.

Luckily I'm not arachnophobic. In fact I find them fascinating. I built a few benches and installed a woodturning lathe and all the gubbins that goes with that in there. The spiders and I coexist quite happily - after all, they were there first....

They are actually quite beneficial - in the summer when I work with the garage doors open all manner of annoying bugs fly in there and most of them end up in a spiders web and I get to watch the drama of nature naked in tooth and claw as a spider leaps out of it's dark hidey-hole (literally a bolt-hole, where the sectional garage is bolted together) and ensnares the offending bluebottle or wasp or whatever. I do rescue bumble bees.

Spider gets fly (bolt-hole can be seen in bottom r/h of pic) :

Spider%20gets%20fly.jpg


Spider hanging from the motor of my drill press:

spider%20on%20drill%20press_1.jpg
 
Around '91 we bought a house that had been neglected after a long and messy divorce between the owners.

Not much cleaning had gone on. Upon taking possession, we found the small bedroom ceiling was literally covered with newly hatched spiders running across room wide webs.

I'm not an arachnaphobe, I just HATE them. I cant see a spider without rage building up inside me. The vacuum cleaner became a weapon of mass destruction that day.

Luckily, although I now live in a warm country, I dont get too many spiders as the area is swarming with lizards of all shapes and sizes.
Anything that has more than four legs in not natural and should be exterminated whenever possible.
 
It wasn't the spiders in Oz that bothered me, used to see Red backs on a daily basis, it was the snakes. The area I was working in was full of Eastern Browns and Red bellied blacks. Both are highly venomous, a bite from a Brown snake is seriously life threatening.Rural Queensland could be a dangerous place. Pythons, pigs , dingoes.....the list goes on ! We're lucky in Britain that we don't really have anything which will do you much harm.
 
I refuse to click on those links and believe me, I'm not the slightest bit inquisitive either.
 
I also did not click the link. I always wait for later comments to get the gist of what the link is about.
Here in cyprus we have 8 species of snakes, one of them is extremely venomous. Luckily Cypriots dont take much notice of conservation laws (all snakes are protected), and kill them whenever they come across them. So far I seen a dozen dead, but none alive.

we also have a scorpion thats poisonous, but its a miniature type barely an inch long fully grown. I found one one day while moving a piece of equipment in an outdoor compound. I was watching it when the cypriot who was with me came over to see what I was looking at.
A scorpion I said, pointing.
Thats poisonous he said, crushing it and grinding it into paste.
 

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