Submitted 3 weeks ago by LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/Kj/vc/KjvcmUDWH6TS0E5.jpg
Oh nooooooo
I’ve gotten brave in my old age. I only relocate them if they become extremely inconvenient …like my doorway spider (sorry frank). I ignore house spiders entirely as they transit my house. Good luck, leggy friend.
I have a pretty orb weaver on the porch (or I did last summer). Hope I get another.
Same, I had two Joros this year. Their webs are LITERALLY gold, it’s so cool. They really just chill. Imagine my disappointment when both disappeared before the New Year and I learned their lifespans. :(
Those are beautiful. Not native where I am. It reminds me of the “banana spiders” where I grew up. There used to be these big, majestic nests of them. I ran face first through one as a kid. Definitely a core memory.
The Joros are very courteous as well.
When they invaded Georgia they covered hiking paths and walkways. If I ever accidentally disturbed a web, they’d move the web up 3-6ft and hang a warning leaf from 3ft long string coming off of their web.
Its like they knew they were invasive and wanted to come in peace.
We have a few mildly dangerous ones and I have kids.
Our rule is if the spider stays in his world we leave it alone, if it’s in ours, they may be out of luck. The doorway is a neutral zone along with usually the entryway and questionably the kitchen.
That’s why I only kill the roaches that venture into my house, if I see a roach in the street I leave it alone to thrive that way all future offspring will be selected for street only living.
I don’t kill spiders. They are my unpaid exterminators.
They accept payment in flies.
They can have all of them they can catch.
Don’t think this uploaded correctly
i thought i had something broken on my end so tried different methods of downloading, or checking if piefed broke something so checked my alts.
Opening the link to this thread in browser works though, so maybe it just isn’t federating properly from the piefed instance?
This should be fixed for future images according to Blahaj admins. Please be sure to thank them for fixing it if that has made your experience better.
In our house the rule is spiders can stay if they’re out the way (up high, etc). When they get too close for comfort for my wife’s tolerance limits, I pick them up and put them outside. Spiders are friends.
That almost rhymed, how about:
In our house the spiders can stay
If they’re out of the way.
If they get too close,
Then it’s time to vamo(o)se
Spiderbro does an important job eating the more annoying bugs.
Good, we should make them even more reclusive and smarter. Honestly, an army of highly intelligent bug killers specialized in keeping out of my sight hiding in the interstices of my house sounds like an awesome idea
Yeah, I think it would be kinda cool if the next intelligent species on this planet after we kick the bucket is arachnid.
Children Of Time Intensifies
I have zero issues with spiders living in my home, they just have to stay out of my sight.
If they evolve to be better at hiding, it’s a win win.
This is a real problem, it’s why you shouldn’t kill rattlesnakes. If we kill the rattlesnakes that make themselves known, over time they adapt to not rattle before striking.
So they will be just called snakes.
Any flies that fly into my house are given a chance to leave. If I can herd them out the window, they get to live and make lots of new baby flies.
On the other hand, their chances of getting a close up view of the fly swatter increase exponentially with every minute they spend refusing to leave and ignoring the fact that I’m literally showing them the exit.
Huh, coincidentally,I just finished reading Children of Time
Envious. The next two books are also great (fourth one coming in a couple months)
I once tried making a similar argument to a game warden about only hunting deer during the day. They were not appreciative of the take.
This was after I hit a deer with my car while driving home from Thanksgiving, it was not a good time.
Why kill spiders? Oh, maybe it’s Australia.
I’m asking myself whether the humans in Australia became extra dangerous in order to acclimate 🤔
Nah, still doesn’t make sense. They kill the mozzies and the blowies for us.
Leave the big ones alone in Australia. They’re harmless. The ones that need killings are tiny and super venomous.
The reclusiveness selection argument makes sense, but why intelligence? Brains are crazy metabolically expensive, and I can’t see why a smart reclusive spider would survive humans any better than a merely reclusive one.
Probably thought that you need to be smart to hide well, which is not at all how it works for most animals but IS how it works for humans.
It wouldn’t. They just added that in there for the scaries and they probably didn’t think it through much.
I have the same thoughts about hitting squirrels with my car.
You’d think we’d have accidentally bred smarter deer by now
Deer kill more americans than any other animal. If anything they’re becoming more top heavy and more lethal to make drivers hesitate before hitting them.
I think we have. In my area many deer during hunting season spend the time within city limits where it’s illegal to fire guns. I am pretty sure they’ve figured it out.
this isnt true tho. we kill loads of them without seeing them.
i like the idea tho
I eat seven spiders every hour
wow, you must be jacked
If I never know that the spider is there then we shall both live a peaceful life.
i select my spiders based on how effectively they can eat and rid me of the annoying gnats
My house spiders are cool. They eat the flies etc and I fish them out of the way before I have a shower. The only disagreement we have is over their little lair in the kitchen. There’s a tiny hole in the skirting board in one corner, and cobwebs gather there. Now and then I brush away the webs and plaster over the hole. A week later the hole is back and the webs too.
open it in the original instance
what?
It’s the same no matter where I open it.
I like smarter spiders, but not the cost of getting there.
I recognised this problem years ago and decided to also let them eat bugs in plain sight. Unfortunately my house isn’t big enough to counter evolution on my own, but I feel there is more people out there who also stopped killing spiders because of this.
As long as the spiders don’t break our agreement they can stay. They eat the bugs and pests, and they can live in the corners of my house. As soon as they come to the floor they’re dead.
I catch them in a glass and cover the top with a piece of cardboard then dump them outside. Spiders eat bugs. Go be free little guy!
fine by me. as long as i don’t see them, they don’t exist.
Aren’t they already smart?
I think this every time I kill a mosquito or fruit fly but they don’t seem to be getting any faster, smarter, or quieter. Where’s Darwin when you need him?
There’s just so many that the relative few getting killed by swatting aren’t having an impact on their genetics.
Also we’ve been doing it for millennia. The evolutionary pressure is already there. These are just the ones with the random mutations that make them slow enough to slap.
It’s like asking why gazzel aren’t fast enough to outrun a lion.
Whenever I see a spider in the house, I don’t kill it. I do however, pick up my cat and say, “look dude, move out along before she figures out how to get to you. She will murder your ass.”
The spider, always, leaves.
And cockroaches, too. They’ll haul ass and scurry away every time. They know.
I kill plenty I don’t see, too, whenever I bug bomb my home.
bebabalula@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Birds also only eat spiders they see. Not sure how that’s any different
The_Che_Banana@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
well…birds aren’t real…soooo…
bebabalula@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Good point…
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You’re forgetting all the spiders that crawl into the bird’s mouth while it’s sleeping.
edible_funk@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Nah that’s just spiders beord throwing off the averages.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also, any effects we may have on arthropod selective evolution by randomly killing visible spiders is going to be vastly overshadowed by the very rapid and immediate changes we’re making to the environment broadly.
We would need somewhere between centuries or millennia of very predictable and consistent behavior killing visible spiders before we saw any change to their overall behavior, meanwhile we’ve all but destroyed the ecosystem at their scale anyway, which is going to have vastly more dramatic impact on populations and evolution, assuming they survive at all. When was the last time any of you remember getting your windows covered with bugs after a summer drive?