I have to hold my hand up and admit that I have a bit of a phobia with spiders.  I am a lot better than I used to be and I don’t mind if there is one in the room, even if it is scuttling across the floor close to me.  I find spiders fascinating and their webs are marvellous.  I just don’t want to touch them.  I won’t kill them: I just avoid them and, if necessary, expell them.  Having said that…  I found some very un-reassuring bits in this story today.First of all the headline: Spider survey set to record bumper crop.¹   I can vouch for that.  Our garden has webs everywhere, each one with a wolf spider perched at its centre.  Despite my irrational phobia, I rather like this.  Its is all nature after all.

More worrying is where the story says:

The six types of house spider, which can grow to a legspan of a couple of inches, are familiar. Others include the jumping zebra spider, which leaps on to its prey rather than bothering to make a web, and the pink prowler, which has six eyes.

So…  reminding us how normal spiders can be two inches wide, it tells us about spider that leap and pink ones with six eyes.  That would not be too bad if it was not immediately followed by:

If you move furniture around and look underneath, or poke about in the garden, you should make some good finds.

Eeek.  My mind has already concatenated the first paragraph and come up with a mental image of two inch, six-eyes, pink, leaping spiders.  I can handle that – but I don’t then want to have the suggestion planted that these things are lurking under every piece of furniture.

I just wish I had not looked at the gallery that comes with the story.  I was happier before learning that there is such a thing as a spitting spider.

1. Is the word “bumper” ever used outside newspapers? [↩]