Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf spider?

Generally, spiders don't really bother me. I'm not particularly fond of them, but I don't freak out when I encounter spiders. I've even been known to move them outside instead of stomping them. For some reason, our house in Atlanta has a large number of spiders, inside and out. The ones outside are fine, but I just don't like them in the house. Justin and I encountered a spider situation recently that disturbed us both.

Justin spotted a kind of large spider in the kitchen one evening. It looked really scary to me because it had pointy legs and its body was thick. Justin either stomped it or hit it with the fly swatter (I can't remember which). This is where things got disturbing. All of a sudden, these little baby spiders start crawling everywhere. Apparently, they were hitching a ride on their mother's back. We were both stomping all over the floor trying to kill all the little babies. There were so many of them! We thought this was an isolated incident where we had killed the mother on the verge of having baby spiders.

I was cleaning out a closet last weekend when I spotted a large spider crawling on the floor. I grabbed my shoe and swatted at it, only hitting a small portion of the spider. This was enough to send baby spiders running. I got on the floor with my shoe and got busy. I eventually found the mother spider and finished getting rid of her and the babies.

I did a quick google search and discovered these are wolf spiders. The pictures of these things are gross.

(photo source)

It seems they are unique in that the mother spiders carry their babies on their back. They apparently aren't very dangerous, but I kill them on sight. I can't have them roaming my house.

1 comment:

  1. Ahhhh!!!!!! I KNEW I would hate myself for reading this post!!!

    ReplyDelete