When you see a spider, what do you do? Do you scream or do you walk away. Or are you like me and stand there and stare at it? And especially if it's a jumping spider, do you try to figure out how to get it into your hands? Im obviously the latter, but many people are the former. When they see it, they either scream and destroy it or they just ignore it. I would prefer that they just ignore it, but many people just don't like them. And why? For many, it is because they are ugly and just plain creepy. They think that something with more than four legs is an alien out to get them and if it isn't removed from the premises, it will over take them over night. Right? Right. They do overtake buildings that aren't well kept and for the most part, if you find one, there are plenty more around. And to some degree, this is really actually quite good. They eat bugs. Lots of them, and the more spiders, the less bugs. If you were to remove every spider in the world, there would be so many bugs that we would die within a few years. That is how important spiders are, even the ones that can make us really sick. It is estimated that in one acre in a meadow, there are about two to three million spiders. In rain forests and wetlands, there are many more.
Spiders are the dominant terrestrial predators on this planet. There are over 30,000 known species and counting. They eat so many bugs a day. Even though one spider usually eats one or two bugs every couple of days, the several trillions add up. And over time, and with all of these spiders combined, they eat over 1.8 billion pounds of food each day! That doesn't really sound like much, but if you think about it, all the little bugs that you find in webs around your house (if you let them) would really be buzzing around annoying the day lights out of you. So spiders really aren't bad and you just have to learn that they are there for a reason and without them, our world definitely wouldn't be very pretty.
So the next time you see a spider and want to destroy it, I would encourage you to move it somewhere else where it won't bother you. And remember that you are a lot bigger than it is and it is much more scared of you than you are of it. Now if you do run across something like a black widow or brown recluse, I would recommend that if you can't get it into something it can't crawl out of and be easily and safely transported away from where you and other people are, I would kill it as quickly as I could. I know that I am contradicting myself, but you really don't want to get bit by one. People have been known to have died from bites from both spiders. But if it is another spider of some sort that isn't harmful to you, leave it alone. It's mostly trying to find a place to hide and find more bugs to eat.
What do you do with spiders when you see them? Please feel free to comment and follow this blog! I'm sure some of my friends would also appreciate your attention as well!
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Thank you for posting this! I found it interesting as well as humorous. People react to spiders in all ways, and most people do kill them when they see one. I wish people were more like me and would stop killing them. Why kill them? They didn't do anything to you, so just simply place it outside where it belongs. Hopefully people will be more aware and realize that spiders are more important than they think.
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