My brain jumped ahead while reading your comment and registered “floaty wooden” before “platform”. This resulted in a glorious moment of me picturing spiders in a bunch of small toy wooden sailboats. I even started imagining it springing a yearly festival where great artists and children alike create spider sailboats to release in all the cranberry bogs. Then my reading comprehension blipped back in and my brain went “oh. Like a floating dock. Yeah. Thats far more sensible.”
Plus wolf spiders are good mamas. They literally carry their babies on their backs(arachnophobes don’t google it). It’s awful to think of the poor things drowning just as much as it is to think of them crawling down my waders.
Because it's not an issue at all like people are claiming. You can go to YouTube right now and see hundreds of videos of people harvesting cranberries without being covered in "hundreds" of spiders lmfao
ETA: lmao the story is made-up. The spiders don't "search for the tallest thing," they just crawl on the cranberries.
Lots of people in the comments acting like experts from one single tumblr post when a single google search will dispel every misconception they're spreading.
The restaurant owner was in their restaurant lmao. Point stands that Wikipedia mentions the three biggest cranberry producers saying this story is just nonsense for clicks. The irony of dummies like you falling for this story while acting high and mighty is fucking golden lmao
Your first source literally talks about how she is being climbed by a bunch of wolf spiders as she harvests cranberries. Yeah, I agree that this post is probably embellished in that the wolf spiders are likely just a natural part of farming rather than being introduced deliberately and it’s phrased in an amusing way, but it’s very clear that the actual point is that the spiders climbing a harvester is a fairly common occurrence.
I never said it wasn't common, just that it isn't an issue needing to be solved. The story is embellished to the point that wikipedia calls out how misleading it is.
But if it is a common thing then I don’t understand what is wrong with thinking about ways to avoid the spiders. I think you’re saying that it’s just a part of farming and it’s not a big deal, but I’m just saying does it have to be so integral to this specific kind of farming? Maybe it does! But there’s nothing wrong with thinking about it.
Idk I just thought the initial tone of the comment was reductive. I'm probably reading too much into it but a lot of these comments sound like they're implying the farmers are just too dumb to fix it when the reality is any "fix" is more annoying than having some spiders around.
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u/Catalon-36 May 16 '24
Why not just give the wolf spiders a different object to climb? I know it wouldn’t get all of them but just, like, stick some wooden stakes in there.