Arachnophobia

Day 361: Arachnophobes, avert your eyes! My botany partners insisted that I post this since it was such a large specimen. I would have felt better about it had it not been walking up the wall right beside my front door, but there you have it. I wasn't going to inquire further into its personal information. I did step out a second time to measure it. Even with its legs bent more than they are here, it was an inch and a half from tip to tip. Had it raised a foot in my direction, I probably would have leapt so far I'd have come down in Canada. What is it that inspires arachnophobia in so many humans? I know that mine is due in part to having grown up in Black Widow country, and saw my mother's reaction when she found one in the corner of my sandbox as she let me out to play one morning. After her initial panic and frantic shrieks, she called my father home from work to dispatch it. Even now, I react strongly when even a small spider gets on me. (Footnote: I have been advised that this is NOT a Wolf Spider, but perhaps a species of Orb Weaver.) (Update: identified as Araneus saevus, Fierce Orb Weaver.)

Basest Fears

Day 6: Sit back down! Now, tell me why you jumped out of your hide at the sight of a perfectly innocent Cross Orbweaver (Araneus diadematus). "I don't like spiders!" Yeah, I gathered that. I have to admit I'm not keen on the subject myself (few people are), but what is it about them which causes one of our basest fears to surface? Is it that they have eight legs? So does an octopus, and I imagine you don't regard octopi with the same measure of loathing. Is it that they seem to defy gravity and can suspend themselves in mid-air? Hummingbirds manage that, although admittedly it takes a lot of wing flapping. If you have lived or live in an area where poisonous spiders occur, you would be justified in according them all due respect when you encounter them, but why do we, collectively and almost universally, dislike spiders so much?

Quite honestly, I don't have the answer. My fear of spiders was instilled in me at an early age by my mother. She was terrified of them, but then, we had black widows to worry about. My mother's reaction to finding a black widow in our back yard made quite an impression on me at age three or four, so I spent many years panicking whenever even a small spider entered my personal space. As a naturalist, I later learned to value them as part of the natural order, but it took quite a bit longer before I could force myself to take the steps necessary to remove a live one from my house.

Ms. Orbweaver slung her rigging between the outdoor housing of my heat pump and a hosta I was planning to divide after I'd pulled the frost-nipped tomatoe vines today. I almost got my head in her web, but caught her presence in the tail of my eye in time to prevent an encounter which would probably have sent me screaming into the next county. It would have been a grave injustice to her, considering the service she renders in my garden. The hosta can be divided later. She's outside, I'm inside, and we'll leave it at that for now.