Beatrice is our "pet." Do you know what she is? (I don't.,)
I mean duh, she's a spider but what sort? If you click on the image, you'll get a fine close-up of her very hairy self.She's been hanging around the kitchen sink for about three months taking up a fair chunk of space.
Her web is kind of odd--she lives on the window sill behind that glass vase most of the time. There's a tunnel-like hole in the web that she uses to come up now and then. I took her picture the last time she did. She has another hole at the other end and she's pretty tidy. After she eats, she drags the leftovers out and dumps them out that other end. I've taken to clearing that part of her web because the bug bits are gross.
Her web is always sort of tattered because she tries to build where we don't want her to go so we have to do deconstruction. To make up for undoing her web, I occasionally herd some of the fruit flies over her way. Yeah, Leslie, we still have the damn fruit flies.
I don't know what kind of spider she is. If you recognize her let me know. If she's something deadly horrible, let me know very, very soon. We've done okay together but I don't want to be washing dishes a few inches from something that'll make my hand fall off if she bites me. After all our time hanging together, I wouldn't squash her but I might take her outside.
Oh, come ON Kate, can't you recognize this one from the forward-facing eyes, the "Union Jack" pattern on the thorax, and the orthognathic fangs? What kind of a wife-of-a-biologist are you?
ReplyDeleteKaren says she's most likely a wolf spider. She'll bite freely if provoked, and while your hand won't fall off, the bite may be painful.
Submit her to What's That Bug . . . or just check out the picture of a wolf spider on this part of their site (scroll down a ways) or do a google image search and see how Beatrice compares.
That's my mom's name, by the way.
Here's one not too dissimilar to Bea.
ReplyDeleteI have a spider a little like this in my laundry room. I've let the web expand just to see how big it can get (about a foot across - I'm impressed). The spider is shy and I hardly see her as she hides in a sort of tunnel. My son says she's a brown house spider in the wolf spider family. (I thought wolf spiders didn't have webs - shows how much I know...)
ReplyDeleteI tend to leave spiders alone in my house if they're not too obtrusive. I have a slight phobia of them, but I like that they eat flies and mosquitos. Go Spidy!
I was just going to write in the comments "GET DOUG OVER HERE!!!" I see he's been here. Thankfully. I'm volunteering at a hospital now and this poor girl's mother came in the gift shop with this horrid story. her daughter was bit in the face by a brown recluse. Her face collapsed. It cost her $30,000 to suck toxins, plastic surgery, etc. The poor girl has to declare bankruptcy. Just as she was getting it together, the other side of her face collapsed. That would be enough for me to bounce my sneaker heel off that spider's back. Sorry. I've had enough of hospitals.
ReplyDeleteThanks guys. I might submit her. She seems fatter and a lot hairier than that other spider. They might want a fat, hairy example? Or not.
ReplyDeleteCD, Face collapsing? UGH.
If Beatrice were at all unpredictable, I might throw her out, but she's a homebody. I only ever see her in two places: behind her vase and on her trampoline of a web. She must come out and rebuild, but I don't see that.
Jennifer, yikes! I do NOT like encountering bugs or spiders in dark places in the basement. I hate it so much, I pretend it didn't happen. This one seems more like a science experiment that isn't contained very well.
But Ugh. Face collapsing.
Now that I've been looking around the interwebs (heh web) I'm wondering if Beatrice might actually be Benjamin. Females are lighter in color, males have more distinctive markings....
ReplyDeleteand what's with this Wolf spiders don't spin webs? If that's true, then this is no wolf spider.
ReplyDeleteI love that you have this spider friend. I appreciate spiders a lot. Now that we have cats back in the house, the spiders are scarce, and it's sort of sad. They are so cool to watch.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I wasn't crazy about the webs in the kitchen at first but I became a spider convert when we got the fruit fly population explosion this summer. Now that that's under control (we used wine traps and the vacuum cleaner) I'm worried that Beatrice is going to go hungry. It's gone from grudging tolerance to affection.
ReplyDeleteokay so billybush at dkos has pegged her as a funnel web spider, a grass spider. And now that I've wandered around the web a while, that makes more sense than a wolf spider. because hey, that's one funnel-y web she's got
ReplyDeleteGrass spider, I think. (read far too much about spiders for the last book, but it's the funnel web that caught at my brain.)
ReplyDelete... and, if I'd read comments, I'd have seen that you already got your answer. D'oh!
ReplyDeleteHave you read the latest David Sedaris book? He has a story about living in France and naming all of the spiders in his house, and taping name cards over their webs. He also trapped flies and fed them. If you haven't read it, you should track it down. It will sound familiar.
ReplyDeleteyeah, I finally managed to get that as a book on tape. (he's such a good reader!) and I love that bit about April in Paris. I just love that Sedaris boy.
ReplyDeleteI'm not terribly attached to Beatrice, though I expect I'll feel a pang when she ends up a lil husk behind the vase.
All you spider witches are coming out now! SEE! They eat the annoying fruit flies! That's why I keep one. Mind you, that's a pretty huge web. My common garden spiders don't make such obvious webs and I clean them away after a couple weeks to stop them traveling away to build new ones in worse locations. Yours being a homebody is better than my wandering ones.
ReplyDeleteI too shoo the flies near the web.