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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

I do suffer from arachnophobia, but I also live in a place where opening a window at the end of a hot summer's day means inviting a Zerg rush of insects. (Okay, there's probably places that are way worse. I feel for those people)

Vibrating spiders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae) are happy to eat anything that gets caught in their webs. In Germany, these are THE kind of spider you will most likely to find in a typical apartment. And they do not discriminate between insects and other kinds of spiders that happen to walk in.

The fact that none of the spiders I am likely to meet where I live (Germany) is even remotely dangerous to anything that is not an insect probably helps.

But still - at some point, the number of insects these beasts kill before they get annoying outweighs the terror I feel when one of these crawls across my desk.

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As soon as I read your first sentence I immediately thought "I wonder if they live in Germany".

Having lived there a few years I was astounded at the lack of fly screens, given that there are just as many mozzies and other bugs flying around there in summer as there are back home in Australia. But in Oz, pretty much every window on every house has a fly screen.

I think I saw two or three in my entire time in Deutschland. So I know they're available, but I don't get why they're so unpopular.

Mmmh, I never really thought of that.

FWIW, I do have a fly screen on my bedroom windows. At work, we have at least one window with a flyscreen in every office. But yeah, all in all, they pretty rare around here.

If it's not harmful to you I would suggest picking one up. I was in your camp and picked up a harmless spider, better now.

This is simplistic but a quick anecdote to hopefully push you like I needed pushing to get over my irrational fear.

Exposure therapy seems to be pretty solid science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy

I am aware of that and have considered it. But it does not affect my life very much, so the pressure to deal with it is not high. Vibrating spiders tend to live in places where they are not disturbed, and they do not move around a lot, so we do not cross paths very often.

I thought picking it up was a bit extreme until I realised krylon was talking about daddy long-legs spider.

Fair enough. If there was a pick-uppable spider I think that would be it.

Those are cellar spiders, not daddy-longlegs (AKA harvestment AKA opiliones; which aren’t spiders, as they only have one body part). They do look similar though! I like to say that I’ve got opilionophobia, and just happen to be afraid of spiders and some other insects that look like daddy-longlegs.

Yea when I lived in a poorly insulated half basement, I'd keep all the spider's alive on the corners and edges, and they killed a prodigious amount of bugs. Was hard to remove all the carcasses without destroying the webs above.

My dad lived in North Carolina. He called it "bug pressure," which is when the bugs are dense enough to resemble a gas.

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