A few days ago I wrote a blog post on saving the bees, which can be found here. Today I thought I'd touch on a more controversial subject - saving spiders!
Some people think spiders are important to us - they keep us free of mosquitos and other pests. In Northern Queensland they can help control the mouse and snake population (okay, I'm exaggerating a bit).
Other people think that spiders are the pests and that they all need to die. This is just as valid an opinion, except for the fact that many more people die from diseases carried by mosquitos each year, than deaths from spider bites.
The inspiration for this post is the huntsman spider I chased out of my girlfriend's house yesterday. Huntsman spiders are no more threatening to human life than your average daddy-long-legs spider (not the harvestman kind, but the ones that live in the corners of bedrooms and bath rooms). The one problem with huntsman spiders is that they're big, scary and fast. I think if you're that big and living in someone's house, you're either a house pet or you're paying rent. As far as my arachnophobic girlfriend was concerned, this spider was trespassing on private property.
Luckily for us, her housemate has a long pokey stick (her housemate, being five-foot-zero, often utilises tools to help her reach high areas). We taped a paint brush to the end of the pokey stick and brushed it off the ceiling in an epic battle that would have rivalled the most critically acclaimed thriller and horror movies. Then, instead of galloping out the open door, Charlotte zipped into a hole in the wall. I call that one a win.
I wouldn't exactly say that I'm calling it early either - I know that spiders are unlikely to hang around the house after being attacked once. We're hoping that once she comes out of her hole, she'll just sneak out the door and disappear forever. This may sound like wishful thinking, but it's actually quite realistic. Spiders don't like confrontation, and they'll migrate anywhere to avoid it.
After my epic brush with death, I decided to research a little bit about spiders.
I think the most surprising thing I learned was that the best way to keep large spiders out of your house is to leave the daddy-long-legs where they are! They look small but their venom is shown to be quite potent - not to humans, but to other insects and larger spiders.
Thinking about this, it made a lot of sense to me. My girlfriends house is right in the centre of the city and it's located in the middle of a parking lot with no garden in sight, yet this isn't the first time a huntsman spider has run rampant in the last two weeks. Her last place was on the edge of South Hobart, down the road from a landfill and literally across the street from the rivulet and dense bushland. After six months of living there, I never had to help her fight giant spiders - if anything, we were fighting the daddy-long-legseses. At one time there were at least 20 in the loo room.
So if you're arachnophobic or living with one, my advice is to keep the huntsmans at bay by leaving the daddies where they are!
Other suggestions I read included using eucalyptus oil to wipe down benches and windowsills. You could also buy sonic devices online - plug them in to the wall and point them towards points where the spiders like to enter.
Or, on the other hand, you could simply overcome your fears. Some people are okay with grabbing a piece of paper and walking the spiders out of the house - that would be the most efficient way, but for some it's a bit of a stretch. The best way to eliminate your pest problem is to get someone else to do it. Even a quivery man-child like me!