Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bellend | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, you aren't alone. This is nightmare fuel. I would move away from the area guaranteed just to escape the possibility. As far as I know, my only fear is spiders and it makes up for being blasé about almost everything else. I still check my room before I get into bed because 2 years ago a House Spider (about the size of a pint glass hole) was on the headboard as I was minding my own business in bed. Not too long ago I had a nightmare about that. Never mind it's parachuting yellow brothers from the sky being a thing. No way.

View on HN

Only young juveniles balloon; on the one hand it's how they disperse from their natal web, and on the other only a very tiny spider is light enough to balloon at all. You probably wouldn't even notice if one landed on you.

In any case, they're a lot more scared of us, and fairly so - imagine Cthulhu peering into your bedroom window, and you've got a fair picture of what it's like to be a spider who's suffered the mishap of somehow attracting human attention.

If Cthulu peered into my bedroom I'd ask him to kill the spider.

Which would avail you nothing, most likely, and this is by way of being my point: it may possibly ameliorate your fear to try to understand what an interaction between a human and a spider might be like from the spider's perspective.

I see spiders as biological robots, I don't feel the need to take on their perspective. I will scoop them up with a cup and notecard, but that's as much consideration as they're getting from me. My cat is a monster by way of comparison, and ruthless to any bugs who dare venture inside if I don't get to them first.

I think I understand why so many humans share this kind of attitude, explicitly or otherwise, but it's no less borne of culpable ignorance for that. I've made friendly acquaintance with wasps, and met spiders who proved smarter than some humans I've known, and there's nothing about those statements that should be surprising; the only reason it is, is because so few humans bother to pay any kind of real attention to the life with which we share this planet, and those few of us who do take an interest not purely motivated by selfish utility are regarded by the rest as creepy and weird.

Maybe if we took the time to get a little less bad at that, we'd get a little better at keeping healthy the ecosystems on which we also depend for survival. It's nice to think so, anyway, not that it matters; apparently it's much more important to us to go on thinking we're somehow special, privileged to dispose of all life on this planet and the planet entire as if we need never fear the slightest consequence. Hasn't this kind of foolishness already got us in enough trouble? Don't you think it'd be a good idea if we didn't keep it up and buy ourselves even more?

Now this is some top tier virtue signalling, good lord, get over yourself. Killing a couple bugs in your house is perfectly fine. Parent even tries to let them out and that's not even good enough for you because they might harm a goddamn bug.

That's enough internet for me tonight.

Virtue signaling, hell - it's not as if I'm vegan, or even vegetarian; I value the lives of wasps and spiders, and couldn't give a damn about pigs or cows. Not a great fan of factory farming, but mainly because it's a blight on the landscape; it'll go on in any case whether or not I partake of the proceeds, so I see no reason not to get the benefit.

Everybody draws their own lines, is all, and this is one of mine.

Yep, the almost absurd level of anthropomorphism is borderline brobdingnagian. It's like he's living in his own insufferable version of charlotte's web.

Well, I'm hardly going to stand here and justify myself to someone who whips out "Brobdingnagian" like it was nothing and then calls me insufferable.

It's hard to avoid the instinct to swat when something crawls or buzzes on you.

Not sure it's a species thing though. I wouldn't jump to murder but I might swat at an uninvited person I found spinning silk behind my washing machine.

Even if they did promise to eat bugs.

I notice this whenever I try to pick up a spider and bring it outside the house. They want to jump off my hand as quickly as possible, and descend to the ground on a strand of silk. They have no interest in biting etc.

So the best way to bring them outside is to put a plastic cup over the spider, then carefully slide a postcard underneath the cup, and then release it outside.

I avoid that because it risks harming the spider - the cup/card interface is basically one giant moving pinch point, and the force required to cause traumatic amputation is insignificant by human standards. But they can only secrete silk so quickly, which makes the escape thread itself very serviceable as a means of carrying them to safety - just raise your hand gradually as they extend the thread, so they don't touch down until you want them to.

It depends on the spider, too. Orb weavers are reliably fearful, which makes sense given how little they can perceive away from a web, but I've had the occasional salticid climb up to perch on my knuckles with no sign of dismay, and wait to hop off until I bring my hand close to a suitable surface.

Sorry dude, I'm giving them a chance with the cup and junk mail method. I'm not carrying one by the "silk". Nature is ruthless and I'm giving them a fighting chance :)

The hell of it is, I have to respect this perspective at least a tiny bit, however unwillingly, because at least you apparently don't default to wholesale murder the way people typically do. Congratulations on clearing the lowest possible bar, I guess? But you're talking to someone who once spent half an hour at the kitchen table carefully disentangling a mud dauber who'd stumbled into a blob of cat fur and couldn't free herself on her own, and then gave her a drop of sugar water and hand-carried her outside. That's my default when it comes to these small, smart animals who face danger from us through no fault of their own, and I really don't know what more can be fairly expected of me here.

For the record, the term murder is used specifically to refer to human on human killing and doesn't really apply to this situation.

I use a clear plastic cup, so I can make sure all the spider's legs are out of harm's way before I slide the postcard underneath.

> You probably wouldn't even notice if one landed on you.

This is not comforting.

No, I suppose it isn't, is it? The poor thing would likely be crushed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com