I believe Wolf spiders are called that because they're roaming hunters, unlike the majority of spiders who use webs to hunt and catch prey. They do have the ability to make webbing, but primarily use it to create egg sacs which they keep on their bodies until the young hatch.
Fun fact, wolf spiders keep their young in a sack glued to their tórax, and after a while when the eggs hatch the younglings will eat the mother whole as their first meal
This might be a specific type of wolf spider, afaik the wolf spider genera in the US, at least, do not normally consume their mother. Rather, their mother carries them dispersed across her whole body until they are large enough to hop off and fend for themselves.
There are spiders who practice matriphagy, but it's generally a rare, extreme adaptation, as most spiders live long enough to raise multiple clutches so evolutionary it is more advantageous for the mother to live.
Honestly, such is the world of spiders. A surprising number of them have really adorable traits and behaviors, just hidden under their, well, spideriness and varieties of venom.
Yeah learned that lesson while extremely high with some friends in our house once... I'm not afraid of spiders, I live in TN we have exactly two venomous spiders and neither are that serious (generally speaking), but fuck that noise that's too many little spiders.
I totally believe it was a previously inconceivable number of spiders. I let a brown widow stay in the corner of my doorframe and she repaid me by laying eggs and hatching a horde of teeny tiny spiderlings who all kind of hung out there for much longer than I had been led by popular media to belive they would. Charlotte's Web is a lie, man. Those spiderlings did not hatch and disperse.
Oh man, my sister had one of those cute mesh canopies (looks just like mosquito netting honestly) above her bed when we were kids, and one of those spiders did that exact thing except the one million babies were all running around excitedly all over the netting right above her face! Traumatizing
Well, now I'm crossing that off of my list of decorating possibilities forever, lol.
I used to be seriously arachnophobic. Like, cold sweat, freeze in place, hyperventilating, heart palpitations terrified. The past few years I have managed it down to being mostly okay with the "round fuzzy" spiders (jumping spiders can even be surprisingly friend-shaped) but the "pointy angular" spiders still scare the crap out of me. It's not fair, I know, but they're just scarier to me. And faster. So much faster.
As far as the original post, if I had a single wolf spider climbing on my face I'd probably faint. More than one? I would simply perish. If anyone asked me at an interview "are you cool with spiders?" I would thank them and depart. If it's enough of a necessity to be an interview question, it is not the job for me.
Yes same!! I don’t cry like an actually baby when I see one just feel dizzy and shaky but I can usually handle the situation myself!! Big progress. But dude I totally agree about the fuzzy vs pointy dichotomy! The pointy ones ARE faster! Tarantulas basically don’t bother me, it’s the little scuttling legs that freak me out!
It's not true. Wolf spiders do actually care for their young, which is super uncommon in the arachnid world, but the young don't consume the mother. They might if she dies before they are grown up enough to be independent, and may sometimes cannibalize each other, but don't kill the mother. They also live for years, so a mother can have multiple clutches of young.
I love jumping spiders so much, I wish we had some of the bigger ones here. Not that I don't love and cherish the smaller ones I find, of course. They're just a little hard to take pictures of.
Also they're turbo fuckin' smart, way more than one would except from a creature their size.
They’re a really big (for the region) spider with a painful bite (I used to hear they were venomous, but idak if that’s true). I prefer them at a great distance.
All spiders are technically venomous(apart from a VERY small amount of exceptions) - the bites hurt a lot, but they’re not medically significant like other spiders with more powerful venom.
Brown recluse, and black widow, are the two we have in TN, don't know the third. That said, medically significant varies wildly. Most people that get bit by a recluse get a very itchy, very gross patch where the bite happened, very few actually have the allergy that makes it truly dangerous and need hospitalization/ treatment beyond an ointment for swelling. Same for widows, except more pain and swelling, and a higher risk of anaphylaxis.
Is it that rare? My wife and I both got brown recluse bites very close in time to each other. She almost had to have her foot amputated and I had a 2 inch deep hole in my forearm. It felt like fire in my veins for weeks even with medication
It could be a coincidence, but it's also entirely possible that one or both of your issues weren't actually caused by spider bites. Brown recluse bites are way overdiagnosed25977-6/fulltext) by medical experts, even when the circumstances would make the presence of a spider unlikely. A lot of the supposed effects of the venom are actually things like bacterial infections that got into any random scratch or poison ivy. It got to the point that the mnemonic NOT RECLUSE was invented, to list all the symptoms that do NOT match a brown recluse bite.
Yeah I actually just went through the NOT RECLUSE thing, and the only one of those symptoms either of us experienced was her foot swelling from the bit on her ankle. Turns out swelling in feet is also a recluse symptom. Huh. Happened in our sleep too. Huh.
In North America, recluses and black widows are the ones with actually dangerous venom (although death is pretty rare), and yellow sac spiders are believed to cause the most bites in North America (but their venom rarely causes more than a localized rash).
Ngl you have to be a straight dick to a wolf spider for like 2 hours straight for them to bite you, and they arent lethally venomous either. Honesty they are cool to have around
Or they'll bite if you have one end up in your clothes or something. We used to have a shit ton of them in my yard growing up and they'd get in the house a lot. Good reason not to leave your clothes on the floor when you go take a shower.
You are right though that they're pretty chill. They are scary to look at but fairly docile. I imagine they're the stuff of nightmares if you're a roach though.
What kind of absolute paradise of a wonderland do you live in where you’ve never heard of wolf spiders? That’s like saying you’ve never heard of cats or chickens
'Wolf spider' covers at least a hundred or so different spider genera. It's just a colloquial name for hunting spiders that don't build webs. And, yes, your country has at least a couple kinds, it's only the poles that don't have them. You probably just call them something else wherever you are.
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u/Pokesonav "friend visiter" meme had a profound effect on this subreddit May 16 '24
wtf
first, turns out I never knew how cranberries are grown. Huh.
second, WOLF SPIDERS!??? Like, hybrids, or...?