Crying Wolf (Spider)

My family likes to harass me about a time when I woke up convinced that I was being attacked by a hundreds of ants. In my defense, I woke up because I was bit by one very large ant. And in my disoriented stage, I may have yelled for help.

I had been in a nearby swamp all day, catching snapping turtles, snakes, and other swamp dwelling critters, and I must have unknowingly brought a swamp ant home with me. I can only assume that some company had been illegally dumping toxic waste in the swamp for decades, resulting in mammoth, stealthy ants, that wanted nothing more than to hitch a ride on an unsuspecting host, all the while leaving a trail of pheromones for the colony to follow so they could lay in wait for the perfect opportunity to attack. Seriously, we measured the ant, and it was almost 2 inches in length.

Today, I was reading an article about a study recently published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders which found that the more frightened someone is of spiders, the larger that person perceives the spider to be.

In the study, as part of fear abatement treatment, researchers at Ohio State University had 57 arachnophobes guide the spiders around the glass tank using a probe, after which exercises they would complete a questionnaire rating their anxiety during the interaction. Participants were also asked to estimate the size of the spiders by drawing a line on a card representing the length of the spider. Researchers found that the more severe the phobic, the large the line was, with some folks estimating the size of the spiders to be nearly three times their actual size. Click here to view article.

It made me think of the giant ant that bit me. It also made me think of a giant spider that was living in the corner of my kitchen for a while, mainly because I was too afraid to do anything about it. I couldn’t try to kill or trap it for fear of retribution from the spider. After all, I am fairly certain they are generally awake when I'm sleeping.

This spider is literally the size of my hand. However, I knew that no one would believe me. While it is well documented that phobias reflect distorted thinking, leading to fear-based and often irrational responses, this didn't relate to me, or this sitation. I wouldn't say that I have a text book phobia of spiders. Of lice, yes, but my issues with spiders and other things that want to bite me is probably more borderline.

The more I saw the giant spider in my kitchen, and the more I began to investigate the situation, the more frightened I became. Thanks to my obsessions with Discovery and Animal Planet, I could deduce form the absence of webs, that this spider was an ambush predator, meaning it would be crazy fast, and also venemous (as if the fact that it looked like a tarantual, including hairy legs and large fangs, wasnt enough to tip me off).

I did eventually tell my friends and family about the spider living in my kitchen, but still, no one believed just how large it was until boyfriend saw it. He didn’t want to mess with it either, but to his credit, and being somewhat prodded along by my refusal to stop screaming or to get off of the kitchen counter, he tried to trap it in a Tupperware container, with hopes of releasing it into the wild. 

The spider escaped, and I have no idea where it went. Believing that spiders are vengeful little creatures, I sincerely hope that both it, and its millions of offspring, knows that we didn’t mean it any harm.

After some research, we believe it to be a Rabid Wolf Spider.

Who, me? I would never bite you! Now just go to sleep...

Photo by T.Shahan