Spiders in Conn.: The trick is to see them clearly
It’s spring.
The birds are singing, the daffodils blooming and the spiders are hatching. The first two are glories. But spiders? “Spiders, rodents and snakes,” said Gail Ridge, an entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, of the three creatures people loathe most in the natural world.
They all deserve more than creep show status
Spiders — eight-legged, often eight-eyed neckless carnivores, weavers of silk webs, itsy-bitsy in children’s songs tarantulasized in the movies — are almost entirely benign, if somewhat differently shaped.
The trick is to see them plain.
Diane Swanson, executive director of the Pratt Nature Center in New Milford, said none of the students at the center are afraid of spiders.
“Not at all,” she said. “Our kids are outside all the time. They learn that everything is here for a reason.’’
And one of a spider’s reasons for being is to kill flies. They, and bats, are our true allies in keeping buzzing pests at bay.
“Someone said we’d be 6-feet deep in flies without spiders,” Ridge said.
And Connecticut is a fine place to live if you’re a spider. In 1948, the noted entomologist B.J. Kaston wrote: “Spiders of Connecticut” and found more than 600 species in the state.
Which sounds like a lot. But world-wide, there are 45,000 to 50,000 known spider species. They’re found in every habitat — forests, swamps, mountains, deserts, — on every continent except Antarctica.
And they’ve been here a very long time. There are fossilized spiders dating back 400 million year ago. There’s a spider’s web, captured in amber, that’s 100 million years old.
Spiders are not insects. They’re arthropods, in a separate class known as arachnids — the same grouping as scorpions, ticks and mite. They are eight-legged, soft-bodied and have no antennae.
In Connecticut, they’ve got some great common names. There’s the blacklace weaver. The six-spotted fishing spider, which weaves water-proof webs to catch aquatic life.
There’s the emerald jumping spider which leap to nail their prey, and the black-and-yellow garden spider — one of the orbweaving band that create beautiful dew-covered webs in the summer and fall.
There’s also the one you see in the corner of your house — the common house spider. They’re the ones that spin webs that, when you don’t dust, become cobwebs.
Most spiders hatch when the weather gets warm. Swanson said house spiders are just around all the time and aren’t harbingers of anything except a good heating system.
“It’s like Bermuda in there,’’ she said of the temperate zone inside our walls.
None of these spiders are at all harmful to people.
“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of spiders are harmless,” said Ridge, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.
There are two spiders — the non-native brown recluse spider and the native black widow spider, which comes in northern and southern varieties — which can have nasty bites. But they’re both very rare.
“I’ve never seen a black widow spider in Connecticut,’’ said Laura RogersCastro, an environmental educator with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Ridge said that a lot of inflamed insect bites that people — and even some medical professionals — claim are caused by spider venom may be bites caused by dirty mosquitoes, ticks or humans scratching an insect bite and making it worse.
Ridge said that spiders have to expend a lot of energy to produce the venom they use to kill their insect prey. They are not going to a leap and attack humans willy-nilly.
“Imagine being a spider and meeting a human being, which to a spider, looks like something the size of the Empire State Building,” Ridge said. “If you’re a spider, you’re going to run.”
Despite their eight-eyed heads, spiders don’t have great vision, although they can follow things in motion. Ridge said she once had a jumping spider sit on her computer screen and follow the cursor as it moved around.
But researchers are finding that spiders — which have no ears — have sensors on their legs that allow them to differentiate between sounds. They hear — just in different ways.
Ridge said the like snakes and mice, spiders move unpredictably. That may be one reason people are unnerved by them
There may be some generational teaching involved.
“In some cases, we leave it to the parents,’’ said DEEP’s Rogers-Castro of budding arachnophobia.
But for the most part, in Connecticut, spiders skitter unstudied.
“There’s a lot more to know, a lot more research to be done,” she said.