Happy to share the house with tireless spiders

10:03am Wednesday 24th October 2007

OCTOBER is frequently associated with ghosts, pumpkins and fancy dress. Shops sell all sorts of rubber horrors, one of which frequently takes the form of a large hairy spider and it has to be said October is, rubber versions apart, a very good month for spiders.

Many people have an irrational fear of spiders and I suppose this is just one of those ancient survival instincts that probably served us well in the past. When humans were living in more tropical climes there was every chance that an encounter with a spider could easily end up with us receiving a painful and, without the help of medical science, fatal bite so an instinct of fear and shock on encountering a spider probably saved many a curious child's life.

These days in Britain we have little to fear from our native spiders.

I would love to say they are totally harmless but this is not quite the case. All our native spiders have sharp fangs which easily deliver poisonous bites.

Fortunately their prey is tiny, consisting of insects, other spiders or even the occasional tadpole. As a result, most spider's mouthparts are just not big enough to penetrate human skin and their best attempt passes us by unnoticed. There are a few spiders that can bite through human skin. The majority of this tiny select group are European introductions and are quite uncommon, but there is one, the Steatoada nobilis, which can commonly be found around and especially within houses. These produce a large, three-dimensional blobby web and are themselves best described as huge with a marble-sized abdomen.

However, the good news for us citizens of Wyre Forest is we are very unlikely to come into contact with one of these as at the moment they are confined to the southern parts of our country, and even this monstrous-looking animal is only as dangerous as a wasp.

There is one spider though that does live in Wyre Forest district and is able to bite. This is the water spider and it can be found hunting under the waters of our pools and lakes.

A couple of years ago I ended up on the receiving end of this animal's jaws when I fell into the water from a floating reedbed in Hurcott Pool.

At first I thought I had just put my hand on a particularly powerful stinging nettle but closer inspection revealed rows of puncture marks almost as if I'd been attacked by a tiny stapler.

It's just the ones that very occasionally sneak into this country hidden in a bunch of fruit we may need to keep an eye out for but incidents of this these days are extremely rare.

This year, with a boom in the mosquito population, I have been more than happy to share my house with a selection of spiders as I feel sure their hunting efforts have saved me from a wealth of itchy bites and swellings I would surely have suffered at the hands of these dedicated and irritating micro-predators.

EDITOR'S CHOICE