Not sure if this is a good thing or not… On one hand, it just might save me from a brown recluse bite; on the other hand, this might be the one thing that the wife has been waiting for to enable her to downsize my position…
I think that, along with most microbiotic life, insects are one of our major competitors for dominance of the earth.
Do you want to end up dinner for future insect overlords?
Of course once you find your critter catcher, the critter you intended to catch is missing—leaving you with a vague unease and itchiness.
My preference is to usher the spiders off to dark quiet spaces which I know they prefer. I figure if they’re in the house there must be a food source and I’d rather have the spiders around to get rid of whatever pests they’re dining on.
I owned one of these years ago and they work much better in concept than execution, never managed to pick up a single bug (and there were some big ones). I now enjoy the much simpler and more effective “trash can with thin rim” scooping method, but I guess you could keep it around if you wanted to tickle someone from a distance.
You mean I shouldn’t just try to gently shoo them out the door?
oh jesus christ why did you do that
How to catch a spider: Get a big glass and pop it over the spider. Slide it up so the spider falls off the wall onto the side of the glass. Wait. Shake the glass a bit if necessary. The object is to wait for or coerce the spider into moving toward the bottom of the glass. Tip the glass to its upright position. Congratulations! The spider is now trapped. Put something over the top of the glass if you don’t trust me. Take the glass outside and dump the spider. Cost: $0.
Noooooooooooope.
Ugh, I feel all twitchy now.
Such a happy family!
Looks around for a flamethrower
Grab the biggest book from the “give away” pile. Slam it against the spider repeatedly, reducing it to icky fluid and mere molecules. Sound effects are optional but desired, and may affect the final score of your performance.
But then it will rain the next day… or something
Grab them with a paper towel & put them outside. Now roaches - we go nuclear on.
These spiders in your house are adapted to living indoors. You aren’t doing them any favors by putting them outside. One of several references you can find immediately by searching on “spiders adapted to houses” -
http://www.burkemuseum.org/blog/myth-spiders-come-indoors-fall
This spider catcher was genuinely one of the first purchases I made when my boyfriend broke up with me and told me he was moving out in a week’s time!
FWIW I have had one or two things wriggle their way out of its grasp while I’ve been on the way to a window, including a wasp who would not be constrained! It’s very handy for getting spiders off of all the surfaces which I can’t reach without a step ladder (tall ceilings) and in corners etc where you couldn’t use a glass. Using it has gradually made me somewhat less scared of spiders, so I’m now more able to deal with catching a spider even without this device (e.g. at work).
Neat, but I’d use it on centipedes and butterflies, not spiders. Spiders are free pest control. They’re basically the Vichy collaborators of the arthropod phylum, helping Nazis humans occupy invertebrate land and rarely turning on us. Hell, spiders are more loyal to humans than cats, which is probably why cats like to dismember them.
Well, in Australia, they do that to us.
I’ve ceded three houses to the bastards already.
