I have zero issues with spiders living in my home, they just have to stay out of my sight.
If they evolve to be better at hiding, it’s a win win.
In our house the rule is spiders can stay if they’re out the way (up high, etc). When they get too close for comfort for my wife’s tolerance limits, I pick them up and put them outside. Spiders are friends.
That almost rhymed, how about:
In our house the spiders can stay
If they’re out of the way.
If they get too close,
Then it’s time to vamo(o)seSpiderbro does an important job eating the more annoying bugs.
My house spiders are cool. They eat the flies etc and I fish them out of the way before I have a shower. The only disagreement we have is over their little lair in the kitchen. There’s a tiny hole in the skirting board in one corner, and cobwebs gather there. Now and then I brush away the webs and plaster over the hole. A week later the hole is back and the webs too.
The reclusiveness selection argument makes sense, but why intelligence? Brains are crazy metabolically expensive, and I can’t see why a smart reclusive spider would survive humans any better than a merely reclusive one.
Probably thought that you need to be smart to hide well, which is not at all how it works for most animals but IS how it works for humans.
It wouldn’t. They just added that in there for the scaries and they probably didn’t think it through much.
Am I missing something here? Why is everyone talking about spiders
open it in the original instance
what?
It’s the same no matter where I open it.
this works for me https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/Kj/vc/KjvcmUDWH6TS0E5.jpg
either way it’s a showerthought about humans being the natural selection for spiders, killing only the ones that come out, effectively selecting them for higher reclusion and intelligence (sorry, on phone so writing the exact text is a hassle)
Ah that one works, thank you. Every time I selected to view the original post or the direct link, it wasn’t that one. Maybe I’ll try poking around to see if I can find an option that gives me that link.
As long as the spiders don’t break our agreement they can stay. They eat the bugs and pests, and they can live in the corners of my house. As soon as they come to the floor they’re dead.
I have the same thoughts about hitting squirrels with my car.
Not that I do it on purpose or feel good about It, but I tell myself that at least the survivors will pass on their survivor traits to the next generation.
You’d think we’d have accidentally bred smarter deer by now
Deer kill more americans than any other animal. If anything they’re becoming more top heavy and more lethal to make drivers hesitate before hitting them. Eventually evolution will make them explode and send a cloud of shrapnel out when struck by a car.
3310 Atomic Deer
Evolution will eventually turn all deer into adorable looking mooses with nokia cell phone exoskeletons.
Hehe, that was an unintentional Nokia reference on my side.
I think this every time I kill a mosquito or fruit fly but they don’t seem to be getting any faster, smarter, or quieter. Where’s Darwin when you need him to answer some questions?
There’s just so many that the relative few getting killed by swatting aren’t having an impact on their genetics.
Also we’ve been doing it for millennia. The evolutionary pressure is already there. These are just the ones with the random mutations that make them slow enough to slap.
It’s like asking why gazzel aren’t fast enough to outrun a lion.
yeah I accidently killed my pet invisible spider :( his name was bob
I don’t kill spiders. They are my unpaid exterminators.
They accept payment in flies.
They can have all of them they can catch. I’ll even toss any I catch into their webs.
I always knew I was right to scoop them up and put them outside. My wife just murders them outright.
Got bit on my left leg last week by a brown recluse I didn’t see. Garage is probably full of them
We are also making serial killers smarter.
I’ve gotten brave in my old age. I only relocate them if they become extremely inconvenient …like my doorway spider (sorry frank). I ignore house spiders entirely as they transit my house. Good luck, leggy friend.
I have a pretty orb weaver on the porch (or I did last summer). Hope I get another.
Same, I had two Joros this year. Their webs are LITERALLY gold, it’s so cool. They really just chill. Imagine my disappointment when both disappeared before the New Year and I learned their lifespans. :(
The Joros are very courteous as well.
When they invaded Georgia they covered hiking paths and walkways. If I ever accidentally disturbed a web, they’d move the web up 3-6ft and hang a warning leaf from a 3ft long string coming off of their web.
Its like they knew they were invasive and wanted to come in peace.
Yes! I walked face first into one or two massive webs and they all moved up a bit! So cool and courteous!
Those are beautiful. Not native where I am. It reminds me of the “banana spiders” where I grew up. There used to be these big, majestic nests of them. I ran face first through one as a kid. Definitely a core memory.
Not native here, either, but supposedly not a real threat to anything. They’re everywhere here now. Coolest thing I learned is that their babies can “balloon” and fly for up to hundreds of miles on wind currents. And the little tiny baby spider in the web isn’t a baby, it’s the little bitch-ass male. The size difference is insaaaane.
Poor male spiders in the web with big mama 😢
We have a few mildly dangerous ones and I have kids.
Our rule is if the spider stays in his world we leave it alone, if it’s in ours, they may be out of luck. The doorway is a neutral zone along with usually the entryway and questionably the kitchen.
Birds also only eat spiders they see. Not sure how that’s any different
You’re forgetting all the spiders that crawl into the bird’s mouth while it’s sleeping.
Nah that’s just spiders beord throwing off the averages.
well…birds aren’t real…soooo…
Good point…
you’ve been eating those spiders in your sleep
Did you know that the average person eats 8 spiders every hour while they sleep?
i’m not sleeping
So that’s why I get a funny taste in my mouth after an Ambien night.
Also, any effects we may have on arthropod selective evolution by randomly killing visible spiders is going to be vastly overshadowed by the very rapid and immediate changes we’re making to the environment broadly.
We would need somewhere between centuries or millennia of very predictable and consistent behavior killing visible spiders before we saw any change to their overall behavior, meanwhile we’ve all but destroyed the ecosystem at their scale anyway, which is going to have vastly more dramatic impact on populations and evolution, assuming they survive at all.
When was the last time any of you remember getting your windows covered with bugs after a summer drive?
