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Comment by schmidtleonard | Hacker News Reader

Most people can get on board with jumping spiders. Big eyes, recognizable behavior, fuzz like fur, aspect ratios that aren't foreign to mammals. But if they mean knobbly things that look like they came out off the sea floor / out of an alien film, yeah, I'll grant them that they have a special skill if they can find those cute.

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I wasn't afraid of spiders until this week https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/yyk8cb/known_as_the_w...

Freaky, except they're only a few millimetres in size and considered harmless to humans.

It would be hard for a spider of medically significant size to suck down their exoskeleton like that.

Lots of fears are visceral, but even if we were to allow only verbalizable fears, one could imagine the arachnophobes thinking "what if this tiny spider burrows through my eyes or ears and lays eggs inside my brain, and then all the baby spiders stream out of my mouth and nostrils"

Why? You could probably wear those much like you would a ring or a bracelet.

I do believe there also is a song about them. It goes something like this: Anywhere you go, you always take your spider, your spider with you... ;)

As a non-arachnophobe, I don't find spiders of any kind to be cute. But I also don't find anything about their appearance or behaviour to be unpleasant or scary. They're just aesthetically unremarkable. Similar to, say, fish---I don't think most people will look at a fish and think either "ooh, so cute" or "weird alien thing, get it away from me", they just see a fish and don't really have any emotions about it.

> Most people can get on board with jumping spiders [...] Big eyes [...] fuzz like fur

Not knowing what spiders are "jumping spiders", I felt like those attributes are what makes many people freak out about spiders in the first place. Looked at some images and yeah, those look way worse than the spiders I have in my house, probably because of those freaky eyes and the thing having fur.

Nope jumping spiders are the worst kind. So are big fuzzy spiders.

They're not insectlike, but in some weird uncanny valley between insect and mammal.

And they can JUMP onto you.

Nope nope nope.

You might change your mind if you read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) or you might not.

Jumping spiders are quite intelligent and playful.

They will play 'catch the laser dot' with you like a cat does or even do little mating dances when you prop a mirror in front of them.

YouTube has many videos of such activities

Have a bit of fun with them next time you see one and your next encounter will not be so unpleasant!

-ex arachnaphobist

I like to imagine that they don't jump, they _teleport_. It's fascinating to watch them blip out of existence in one spot, or one orientation, and appear in another location in the same instant. Forget what it must be like to be a bat[1], what would it be like to be a tiny jumping spider?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

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