With all due respect to E.B. White, spiders just aren’t that cute. For many of us, they’re downright creepy. Our phobia, which at times can be enough to make us scream or go running to the doctor for fear we’ve been poisoned, peaks during these times of mild weather, when our indoor/outdoor lifestyle welcomes innumerable arachnids every time we open the door. There are and always have been many myths surrounding spiders. For the straight story, we went to ecologist Jim Steffen, who has studied spiders for the past six years at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
— Shaila Wunderlich, [email protected]
1. They’re not all that bad. Of the 400 to 500 different species of spiders in Illinois, only four or five typically make their way indoors. And part of what they’re doing indoors is eating other household insects, such as flies, silverfish, gnats and mosquitoes.
2. They don’t bite. OK, they can bite, but the chances of them getting close enough to your skin and provoked enough to do so are slim. Furthermore, due to their low venom levels, “if one does bite you, the chance of it amounting to anything more than an itchy, mosquito-type bite is comparable to the chance of getting struck by lightning,” Steffen says. Despite what your friends and neighbors may tell you, poisonous species such as brown recluses and black widows are extremely rare in this region. “I’ve been studying spiders as part of my career and have never seen one,” Steffen says.
3. Prevention before extermination. Measures such as keeping window screens tightly sealed, using yellow bulbs in your exterior lights, reducing clutter, tightly taping cardboard boxes, and keeping firewood and vegetation away from the house will go far in keeping spiders from ever entering in the first place.
4. Consider pesticides a last resort. There are many effective things you can do to rid your home of spiders before you go reaching for that can of pesticide. Vacuum and dust up their webs to destroy their home, their eggs and, in many cases, the spiders themselves. When you see an actual spider, kill it or remove it (your choice). One of Steffen’s go-to moves is to place a cup over the insect, slide an index card between the cup and wall or floor, and walk the cup outside to free the critter. Many of the blogs and chat rooms we visited swear by eco-friendly tactics as essential oils, hedge apples and eucalyptus leaves, but Steffen has never tested any.
5. Get a grip. Taking into account their relative harmlessness and important role as a predator of other household insects, the urgency to forever rid our homes of all signs of spiders comes slightly into perspective. As sure as they will invade our homes in the summer and fall months, they will exit in winter and spring. “I will certainly pick up a spider I see crawling across my dinner table, but I don’t go hunting around the house for them,” Steffen says.