In praise of spider sympathisers

In our western society, nothing says “I harbour slight Buddhist beliefs” more than a person who sees a house spider running along the carpet and puts a drinking glass over it. Nothing says Zen more than seeing someone outside their backdoor lobbing a big house spider in to the bushes.

I’m one of these types. I’m sure you are too. I like my status as the family’s chief-trapper.

We sit in stark contrast to that other race of modern human, the spider-stamper. I shake my fist at them.

Giant house spider - Wiki Commons

The giant house spider Tegenaria domestica is an elegant spider I think. A spider, like the rest, most comfortable on its web (they have little funnel webs), but whose males have to throw caution to the wind and make mad dashes across carpets to find females at this time of year.

It’s their mad dashes I love most. Their brains seem to be digitally arranged into all-or-nothing responses. They are unable to modify speed – it’s either ‘stationary-mode’, ‘amble-mode’ or ‘scuttle-mode’.

Never in-between. Never a trot or a prance.

And the way they move those legs. It would be so much more fascinating if it wasn’t so itch-inducing.

Think about it though. When you look at a spider’s leg you’re looking at a kind of half-muscle / half- pneumatic-piston, whose pressure is regulated by water. A jangling jointed pole of controlled tension.

Now imagine working eight of the things at once. Imagine trying to get all eight legs pneumatically pumping in such a pattern so as to induce a high-speed scuttle like that of Tegenaria.

I am in awe of any creature that can multitask like that.

I’m rather proud of my ‘let’s-just-put-a-cup-over-it-and-pop-it-outside’ gentle stance on Tegenaria encounters. But, sadly, it turns out I may as well be a spider-stamper. Why? Because the bloody things apparently die when left outdoors in cold weather, according to spider expert Chris Cathrine this week.

This is terrible news for us chief-trappers. We don’t want them to die, after all.

There is only one option now. We are now going to have to pretend to our families that we’re catching these lusty dirtbag spiders, while fiendishly ushering them underneath skirting boards like something out of Schindler’s List (“Go, be safe.”).

It’s really going to happen. We are actually going to have to pretend that we’re throwing spiders into bushes, to save our families the constant worry of living with alongside these impulsive loved-up males. All so they don’t die outside in the cold.

We are to become spider-sympathisers, you and I.

Maybe this is a next step in human society? An acceptance that houses are about more than humans. They are modern-day caves – they can be modern homes to ancient cave refugees; swifts, bats, beetles and, of course, mad, scuttling, sex-obsessed Tegenaria.