• Nougat@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    So I’m like 13 years old, climbing a tree at a friend’s house. It’s a bit of a shimmy up the trunk, I’m well in the air, hugging the tree. I look down at my feet to make sure I have footing before lifting a hand above my head to reach for a branch.

    As my head is going from looking down to looking up, just as I am grabbing the branch and hanging from it, I realize that my nose is almost touching a big old wolf spider mama, fully laden with all her children.

    DROP

    I never climbed that tree again.

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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        1 day ago

        One climbed onto my foot while I was brushing my teeth once and I launched myself into the wall behind me pretty hard which hurt. Other than that I don’t think so.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        To add to what nougat said, because that’s very much the appropriate answer…

        All spiders are in fact venomous- it’s part of how they feed. Many species, the venom is not harmful to humans, or only very weakly so. (Wolf spiders qualify as “very weakly so”)

        That said, you try keeping a reasonable head when you suddenly come eyeball-to-eyeball with a wolf spiders qualify and her kids.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            So, true spiders digest their food externally by injecting the venom. They then slurp it up. So the answer to that is “Yes”. Some true spiders may also eat the more solid bits, but that’s in addition to. but again, many- most- spiders are essentially harmless to humans.

            harvestmen (daddy long legs) are not venomous and lack the mouth-parts necessary for injection, but they’re not true spiders.

              • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                Dammit I need to be more careful when posting on mobile. Meant to say not, lol. Thanks for the correction

            • remon@ani.social
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              1 day ago

              So, true spiders digest their food externally by injecting the venom.

              That is not quite correct. They inject the venom to kill the prey, after that they will inject digestive fluids which will liquify and pre-digest the insides before the spider slurps it up again. But the venom is not essential to the disgestive process.

              harvestmen (daddy long legs) are not venomous and lack the mouth-parts necessary for injection, but they’re not true spiders.

              Harvestmen can bite (though many are too small to penetrate skin, it’s very rare), so it’s not like they lack the mouth-parts per se, they just don’t have any venom glands that are feeding into the mouth-parts.

              Also Opiliones are not just not true spiders, they are not spiders at all (“true spiders” are one of the 3 infraorders of the spider order). Opiliones are their own order.

              However “daddy long legs” could also refer to an actual spider (and a true spider at that), Pholcidae. It’s quite the ambigious name (there is even an insect, the crane fly that is also going by that name in some places).

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        2 days ago

        When they get spooked they launch their kids everywhere to overwhelm potential predators. Imagine if you squashed a spider and suddenly you were covered in hundreds of tiny spiders?

      • seathru@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 days ago

        No, they are spider bros. They kill brown recluses, black widows, and other things that are dangerous. Typically do not mess with humans unless seriously provoked.

        • remon@ani.social
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          1 day ago

          I get the sentiment, but black widows (and Theridiidae in general) are quite proficient in taking out wolf spiders and other prowling spiders, not the other way around.

          • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            I’m going to need to see some videos before I can determine who is winning this debate. With heavy metal background music, though I would also accept a David Attenborough narration. With and without the wolf spider swarm.

            sigh For completion sake, should probably also check out some videos of each of those spiders vs other things like scorpions, mice, mongeese, non-mon geese, snakes, etc.

            • remon@ani.social
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              1 day ago

              I wouldn’t recommend those types of videos. These are just the arthropod version of cock- or dog fighting and basically animal abuse. They also don’t actually teach you much, since the scenarios don’t reflect their actual behaviour in nature.

              For example, almost every active hunting spider will kill a black widow if you put them in an enclosed space together. But in the real world the widows would be in her web where something like a wolfspider would get trapped long before getting close to the widow spider.

              • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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                22 hours ago

                Yeah, they are morally dubious at best. But there’s just something about watching things fight to the death that makes it so fascinating. Though I agree that it is best if they are each in their own natural environments rather than just shoved in a glass box together. They should have the option to disengage, too, because it’s also interesting to know when two killing machines opt to not try each other (and based on the one video I did see of wolf spider vs black widow, I’d guess most of them would go that way because the wolf spider wasn’t very interested in getting anywhere close to the widow and only killed it in the end because it kept trying to web it up).

                That makes me wonder how many of the animal vs gladiator fights would have resulted in them walking away from each other.