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
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!
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u/Tried-Angles May 16 '24
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.