Merry and Olde back to Merrie Olde … #2
British Homing Toilet Spiders
I moved to the village of Carlin How in North Yorkshire from a similar sized town in the states, Oak Hill, Florida. That fact alone has all my new neighbors convinced I am as mad as the proverbial hatter.
“Leave all the sunshine for Carlin How?” they cry, eyebrows lifting. “What are you on about?”
Here’s the thing. Thirty degree heat or more with 99.9 percent humidity might be a nice place to visit, but - trust me - you really, really wouldn’t like to live there. Not if you like to walk or dig around in the garden that is. I used to have to be out dragging a watering hose around my garden by 7 a.m. (and I’m not a “morning person”) because it was too hot to be out there doing garden chores one minute later.
Then there were the snakes. I couldn’t reach for that juicy tomato without a good look around and under the plant first. There are coral snakes and all kinds of poisonous pit vipers, including several species of rattlesnakes, to be found living in Florida’s urban gardens. Since I'm the sort to forget all that and reach without looking, I really shouldn't be gardening around anything more dangerous than stinging nettle.
Let's also not forget the biting bugs - from Florida’s 80 different varieties of mosquitoes (33 of which are known to be harmful to humans and animals) that live and bite happily all year long, to gnats, no-see-ums, horse and deer flies, fire ants, stick ants, and many, many, many others that don’t make gardening much of a treat either.
And consider the spiders: Asian Crab spiders as large as your hand; big hairy wolf spiders hunting smaller spiders and other prey through the house every night; black widows, brown widows, red widows in their tatty webs - all of them poisonous to greater or lesser degrees; recluse spiders (don’t believe the experts who claim Florida has no recluse spiders. I have seen them there with my own eyes); Orb spiders with bodies the size of an old-fashioned English penny hanging suspended in their magnificent three-foot-by-three-foot webs; jumping spiders the size of an American quarter, and the list goes on and on ...
So I felt very safe and wildlife secure in Carlin How until that day in July when I found myself in the company of the rare and now dreaded British Toilet Spider!!! (At least I hope they are rare!)
It happened like this:
I had been reading on “the throne” and when I got up to leave, just as I flushed, I saw something move rapidly along the top of the toilet bowl just under the seat. I gingerly lifted that seat and to my horror saw a very big, in fact FLORIDA BIG, black long-legged spider leaping neatly over the running water jets. She was so not bothered by the water I could only conclude she had been living there for quite some time.
Being adverse to killing spiders (they, too, after all have a role to play on our planet and quite possibly a more important one than mine), I offered her a ride on the toilet brush to the great outdoors. Being British - therefore quite mannerly - she accepted, and I took her to live in the courtyard. Since it was raining that day and I already knew she liked water, I thought she’d live out there quite happily.
I was wrong.
Just two days later I went in to have a bath and, glancing at the toilet (which I do now with a degree of paranoia because, despite all the Florida spiders named above, I had never before encountered one living inside my toilet bowl), I noticed a bit of gray fluff on the side of the toilet seat. A closer look revealed it to be a SPIDER WEB!
And, there, at the edge of the attached web but down nearer the floor, was my homing spider back again. I’ve put her back outside twice since, but like a well trained dog, she comes straight home every time.
So I’ve named her “Fright” and will probably just have to keep her. But I don’t think I’ll ever get used to having her attached to my toilet.
(Having managed to post one photo from the internet which you'll see further along, I thought I'd be able to download a great picture of Fright for you in her natural habitat, too. But after clicking on 'create' and 'upload,' then clicking on 'shared albums,' and then on her picture, and then re-selecting 'create', and clicking on 'share', adding in a title, 'clicking on the little paper airplane at the bottom of the screen' to send the picture to my email, then 'clicking on copy' and going to this blog and 'putting the curer here where I wanted the photo' and 'clicking on control V' and then finding four copies of this entire blog repeated over and over, but no photograph ... I said "tut, tut, tut ... no pictures for you folks," and moved on.)
But I couldn't move on without telling you another spider tale, the one my grandson Nathan made me tell to his entire class when he was an eight-year-old child and not the strapping 16-year-old young man he is today.
I lived then in Savannah, Georgia and in Savannah’s climate one waters one’s garden pretty much every day if one likes plants to actually live. The tap where I connected my hose was in bright sunshine so I was very surprised one morning to spot one of the more spindly members of the Latrodectus family (black widows to you) hanging about in her tatty web about a foot away from the tap. Widows prefer dark corners under chairs and stairs to bright sunshine, but clearly this one wanted a darker tan to better show off her striking red belly.
(I say tatty web, but the density of steel is about six times that of spider silk, yet their silk is correspondingly stronger than steel wire of the same weight. I only use the word “tatty” because the widows build crap looking webs in comparison with any common garden spider.)
L. hesperus
While looking for a nice spider picture like the one above I learned the genus Latrodectus was erected by Walckenaer in 1805. (Erected is not a word I would have chosen here, but much of this bit is lifted verbatim from a weighty tome, including the use of that word in this sentence so I’m sure it is scientifically correct). Arachnologist Herbert Walter Levi revised the genus in 1959, studying the female sexual organs (one does wonder) and noting their similarity across described species. He concluded the color variations were variable across the world and were not sufficient to warrant species status, and reclassified the redback and several other species as subspecies of the black widow spider.
Levi also noted that study of the genus had been contentious; in 1902, both F.P Cambridge and Friedrich Dahl had revised the genus, with each being highly critical of the other. Cambridge questioned Dahl's separating species on what he considered minor anatomical details, and the latter dismissed the former as an "ignoramus".
(I here rest my case that men will fight over absolutely anything.)
Anyway, I was careful about my personal Latrodectus and watched for her presence every day before reaching for the water tap. Then, one bright sunny morning, she was gone.
“Not good,” thought I, scanning the entire area for her potentially deadly presence.
As my eyes roamed over the bricks, noting the bits of moss, the gray and crumbly bits of baked clay, the small lizard about a foot away, the cracks in the wall itself, and then back over everything again ... and yet again ... I suddenly looked thoughtfully at that lizard.
“You there,” I said, speaking directly to it. “Did you by any chance eat my spider?”
The lizard looked directly back at me and then, slowly, dropped one eyelid in a clear and crafty wink. It then yawned widely and, I swear, smiled before settling her face back into its normal little lizardy expression. I never bothered looking for the spider again.
I’ve been interested in the natural order of things since childhood, so I was quite excited to be back in a country with an active “Green” political party.
“Hot diggidy dog, “ I said, using words from my childhood that have since been replaced by the “F” word in America and elsewhere.
But I quickly learned the Green Party doesn’t appear to have the strength I had hoped it would have. Yes, it’s on the ballots, but very few people seem to be ticking that box on election days.
It seems to me Green Party concerns should be everyone’s concerns, especially with those younger voters already now dealing with climate change, with the declining numbers of human sperm (by half over the past 40 years) and pesticides lodged in our brains and babies, to name but a few of the current horrors happening out there in nature land. Yet jobs, money, housing, schooling and health care seem to take precedence in both the news and offices of power.
Money especially tops the charts which, since it is just something we made up and agreed to use, seems very silly compared to, say, the worldwide famine our species faces should all our little honeybees and other pollinators suddenly go belly up.
And, alas, our busy little bees are indeed falling off the perch at a very alarming rate, yet only a comparative handful of the billions of people on this planet seem all that bothered about it.
Back in the 1960s (yes, I’m that old), the Rachel Carson book “Silent Spring” caught the attention of pretty much everyone in the United States. Laws with real teeth to protect the environment and the banning of the insecticide DDT came out of it. Then everyone went back to sleep and newer and even more deadly poisons were eventually developed, subsidized and then unleashed across the agricultural and urban world.
Today, in addition to the DDT my generation still carries in our cells, we ALL carry those newer toxins inside our bodies in ever increasing amounts. How can this possibly be good?
But then, the excellent documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” wasn’t able to convince half of voting Americans to accept climate change as a real threat to our planet, despite their country having now annually logged ever record-breaking high temperatures since the turn of this century. (I read just last night where most Trump supporters DO actually believe our climate is changing, so how then could they vote for him? Oh yes, that's right, he was going to replace national health care with his new and improved model and build a wall. How’s that working for you, Trump people?)
Then there’s the scorched earth policy of today’s millions of acre wildfires in the American west, the larger than ever before super tornados in the mid-west, and those blizzard conditions every winter in the north-east - while middle-of-America Michigan, which used to have lots of snowfall in the winter, now some years hardly has any.
Horrific weather events are reported almost nightly on American television news, so is the climate changing in America? You think???
But perhaps thinking is too much to ask of a population having brains soaked in agricultural pesticides and bodies nourished on modern dwarf wheat, soy, corn, and all those other GMO foods?
In the wee hours, when I can’t sleep because of pondering thoughts like those above, Fright-the-Spider really doesn’t really seem very frightening after all.
p.s. - As an author, I’m always interested in getting people to read, but many people today tell me they no longer have time for reading books. Here’s a tip: Put whatever book it is you’d like to read into the bathroom beside the toilet and then check under the seat for spiders. At some point during the day you’ll at least have the opportunity to read there for a few minutes. Eventually those minutes and words will all add up and before you know it you will have finished that weighty tome. You’re welcome.
p.p.s. - You may have noticed the text in this blog above changed sizes and spacing from time to time. I’m very sorry about that. I’d like to tell you I did this to keep your attention, but that would be a lie. My computer arbitrarily and quite randomly makes these kinds of decisions for me and then won’t let me fix them. My computer is a control freak.
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