It's that time of year when the press kicks off with this rubbish. Spiders just want a nice warm place to mate. UK species are overwhelmingly completely harmless, plus they eat flies and other insects, and they mostly want corners and places we don't use. Welcome our spidery friends.
There must be fewer of them, since insect numbers, their prey, have fallen. It's even more important to avoid killing them. youtu.be/qYSwpdDkcMM?...
I'm sure that in many cases Arachnophobia is learnt or imitative behaviour, from children observing adults, unfortunately mostly women, flapping about when they see spiders, as some do with mice or wasps. britishspiders.org.uk/arachnophobia
Well done you!
I’ve been slowly deprogramming my arachnophobia by joining spider communities on Reddit. R/jumpingspiders has been the most effective.
"We need some stock pictures of spiders for this story." "You mean the kind that enter houses in autumn?" "Nah, anything'll do."
Yeah orb weavers only enter the house if you carry them in, either through walking through their webs or carrying them in with one’s laundry.
When I moved up here (Yorkshire) from Torbay, the local press was all full of scare stories about the oh so very dangerous False Widow Spider that was moving into the area So I looked up some better quality pics and saw a perfectly normal spider Took a bit to find they naturalised in Torquay, safe
[Laughs in Australian] Anyway, we have a cellar spider in our toilet room that I’m particularly fond of because every time I see her she has a new dead mosquito in her grip and her web is full of corpses. She looks gravid so I welcome her industrious offspring.