Most of the spiders living in the house that I share with my husband and our terrier are the small-bodied, long-legged variety. They station themselves quietly in the corners, favouring the spots where two walls and the ceiling meet. Currently, there are so many spiders living in our house that all the prime corners, as described above, are occupied, and some spiders are obliged to live in the simpler corners where just one wall meets the ceiling or where two walls meet. Others live in the spaces behind any one of the several doors in our house that are perennially propped open. Still others inhabit the windows, where they litter the sills with tiny corpses.
The spiders have spread such lengths of webs along the ceiling and down the walls that I no longer wonder incredulously, like I once did, at depiction in movies and TV shows of old, uninhabited houses with interiors draped in webs from floor to ceiling. I am convinced that our house would reach that state in a few months were we to vacate it.
Currently, there’s a spider residing in the space between the speckled, antique mirror that hangs above our bathroom sink and the tiled wall beside it. I note its golden colour while I stand in front of the mirror brushing my teeth. Last week, there was a small spider in this same spot. I am uncertain whether this spider usurped it or if the small spider simply grew up.
The arachnids procreate and proliferate. Whenever I spot a sack of eggs next to an adult spider, I tell myself, “I better put those eggs outside before they hatch,” but this is a chore easily put off. A few days later, due to my inaction, I’ll find that forty or fifty tiny baby spiders have burst forth. They stay by their single parent for some time, their numbers diminishing as they grow larger. I suppose that this diminution is both by death and dispersion.
I don’t know why we have so many spiders living in this house. It is an old house and there are no screens on any of the doors or windows, yet I don’t recall other similar quarters being so inundated with arachnids. Was there a time when I was less complacent about their presence, or was I once less aware of them? I wonder if our intermittent human houseguests ever notice them hanging above the bed in the spare bedroom? No one has ever mentioned them, but then they are so still and make no commotion.
I don’t like killing insects in general, and I can’t remember ever killing a spider intentionally, though I have extinguished the lives of many through the plain brutishness of being human, inadvertently sucking them up with the vacuum or drowning them in the shower. I don’t see the sense in killing a spider. They don’t cause any harm, at least not the ones around here, and when their presence disturbs – I won’t share quarters with any spider big enough that I can hear its footsteps as it crosses the wood floors – they are easily relocated with a container and a slip of paper.
One evening my husband and I were watching TV upstairs in the attic when a medium-sized, shiny black spider dropped eighteen inches or so from the ceiling and hung there suspended by its web. A moment later it climbed up again, crawled a little ways along the ceiling and dropped again. The spider repeated this movement over and over while we sat watching our show. Normally I would relocate a spider of such speed and agility, but, in this instance, I simply kept an eye on it. Had it crossed a certain threshold, such as dangling directly above any part of our bodies, then I would have made an effort to move it. As it was, it continued its seemingly pointless aerial dance and never crossed my invisible boundary. The following evening when we returned once more to our attic entertainment room, it was gone.
Since the spider population burgeoned this year to proportions I have never seen before, I considered removing some of their numbers. But I was hesitating. “They’re probably multigenerational indoor spiders,” I told my husband, “I doubt they can survive outdoors. They don’t have the skills.” He had no stance on the removal of the spiders, but he scoffed at my theory.
Despite my concern for their fate, I decided I would relocate some of them. I wouldn’t get rid of all of them, I would just reduce their numbers. I got the stepladder from the garage and a large plastic yoghurt container and its lid from the kitchen. Beginning in the most populous corner of the hallway, I climbed the ladder, held the container under a spider and gently knocked it with the lid. It dropped in. Taking the container to the open bedroom window, I leaned out as far as I could, so as to minimize the spider’s fall, and upended it into the garden below. On my next trip up the ladder, in an effort to economize, I tapped three spiders into the container before emptying it outside. I removed ten spiders from the hallway then moved on to the bedroom. I removed all the spiders that loomed over the bed and several from each corner of the room. Fourteen in all. When I was finished in the bedroom, I returned to inspect the hallway. I’d made no visible dent in their numbers, and I had yet to tackle the kitchen, the spare bedroom, the living room or the attic. Nevertheless, I paused my efforts for the day.
The following morning while scrolling through social media, an image came up in my feed, a graphic poster touting the benefits of house spiders. The poster had photographs and names of all the bugs that spiders eat: flies, silverfish, earwigs, mosquitoes, fleas, moths, and ants. I was relieved by this poster. Given I prefer spiders to every single one of the creatures listed, I concluded then and there that the spider population would self-regulate. If they ran out of food they would die off, right? I ended my relocation campaign.
Having decided to continue cohabitating peacefully, I wanted to know more about my long-legged housemates. I’d never thought to look them up. I didn’t even know what they were properly called. I’d heard some people call them “daddy longlegs,” but I grew up near a lake and to me daddy longlegs were those skinny, stilted insects that skittered across the surface of the water, also known as crane flies. I typed “long-legged house spider” into my search bar and discovered that their Latin name is Pholcus phlangioides. According to Wikipedia, they have “a habit of living on the ceilings of rooms, caves, garages or cellars.”
There was no mention of them living outdoors. Was I on to something when I had theorized that their expulsion from our home would knell their death? I continued to read and learned that this species comes from the subtropical regions of Asia. They are not adapted to live in the cold and so when they arrive in a Canadian climate they prefer to live indoors. They are considered to be synanthropes, in that they benefit from living in proximity with humans. I read with some satisfaction that they have “a particular affinity for dimly lit, dark areas that are quiet and calm.” Finally, I read that they are cannibalistic. So while they maintain peaceful relations with their own kind when the getting is good, when the getting is gone, they will devour one another. How many other insects occupied our home that the spiders were able to survive in such great numbers? What other creatures might overwhelm us if we rid ourselves of them? My research bolstered my decision to leave them be.
*****
In late autumn, the spider population dwindles and some corners become vacant again. Then, I take a long-limbed duster and wave it over the ceilings and walls, swooping up the interminable lines of webs. I dust behind the radiators, under the furniture, under the clawfoot bathtub and around every plant pot. I continue in the corners of the wooden staircase that led to the attic, around the light fixtures, behind the television, under every shelf and every table. It is in the furthest corners of the living room, where the vacuum rarely reaches, that the most havoc has been wreaked. Here the corpses of flies and moths are piled in heaps, and the floor is speckled with opaque white spots – the excrement of the arachnids. I am barely through dusting when it is spring again, and the best corners of the house are once more occupied. Undisturbed, the Pholcus phlangioides carry on in the calm and quiet of our dimly lit rooms.
