October 4

The spiders of October

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If you’ve gotten a faceful of spider web when you head out of the house in the morning lately, you may be wondering “Where did all these spiders come from?!”

Our sister site Maple Leaf Life investigated the arachnid explosion.

Marcus R. Donner/www.marcusdonner.com

By Mike Ullman

About that invasion of spiders we’re all seeing – “well, there’s not one.”

An invasion, that is, according to Sue Anderson at the Woodland Park Zoo.

“Every fall we get calls at this time of year about the spider invasion,” mainly from people who are seeing huge orb-weaving spiders hanging everywhere in their gardens.

Anderson, who is an invertebrate keeper at the zoo – “I’m the bug and spider keeper” – says that in truth the spiders have been here all summer. “What becomes visible this time of year is the older female spiders who are so full of eggs they are huge.”

Soon the spiders will drop off and lay their eggs in leaf litter. Then most will die, Anderson said. Next year the eggs  hatch and the process starts again, with tiny spiders weaving tiny webs through the summer.

Then the adult spiders will again become visible. “When they get bigger, they need more space,” she said. “They’re really very beautiful spiders if you can make yourself stop and look at them.” You can see Anderson being interviewed about spiders by KOMO 4 News here.

While we’re on the subject of spiders, Anderson says house spiders – those big black ones – will probably die of the cold if well-intentioned humans carefully pick them up and put them outside. “They are funnel spiders, European spiders who hitched a ride here in the 1900s. They live in caves, houses, old buildings.” If you feel you must put a house spider outside your house, try a garage.

Don’t pick it up with your bare hands, either – while most spiders aren’t dangerous, some people are allergic, Anderson said.

Want to know more about spiders? Rod Crawford, curator of arachnids at Seattle’s Burke Museum, is an acknowledged expert.

He has an entire section of the museum’s website titled The Spider Myths Site, based on his 39 years of working with spiders and answering questions about them.

People’s concerns come from a widespread and surprisingly uniform set of assumptions and “general knowledge” about spiders. And almost all of this widespread information about spiders is false!

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  1. Thanks for the info, especially about the house spiders. Not sure I'll put them in my garage, but maybe I'll just leave them alone, rather than moving them outside.

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