Not arachnophobic, but looked down and saw this lady racing up my shirt, a few inches from my neck. My scream was internal.
I managed not to hurt it as I brushed it off.
My scream was internal
I can guarantee you mine would have been, high, loud and extremely external.
I think the expression, I would've woken the dead, would fit.
Hard to tell without a good look at the abdomen, but I think this is a barn spider. The bite isn't bad for humans. They are very creepy cute when resting, they fold their legs up and become a kind of diamond shape.
Edit: It looks like both Neoscona crucifera and Araneus cavaticus are commonly called barn spiders. I linked to the first but the second is the namesake.
I love these little spiderbros. We get them on our front porch and nearby areas all the time. They demolish things like earwigs for us when they're dumb enough to get that high, and regularly handle bigger mosquitoes. They do tend to kill a lot of moths though, which isn't necessarily a good or bad thing for humans.
They're also chill as hell. Having a habit of building webs near the door, I've walked into many of their masterpieces and had them suddenly appear on my face lol. Never a single nip, and they'll gladly move to a hand that's placed in front of them and be moved to a new spot. Wouldn't recommend handling spiders in general, but these are about as human neutral as it gets. They just don't see us as enough of a threat to bite unless you mess with them heavily.
We've had generations of them now, all building webs in the same area. It's really fucking cool tbh. Like, hundreds of these having lived out their lives in harmony with us, never causing problems, usually helping out, and being beautiful along the way.
I'll take exception to "little," but yeah they're pretty benign to humans. Perfectly designed to look terrifying though (which means we evolved to be scared of spiders that looked like this for whatever reason).
I think I'm broken lol.
I've never had a fear response to spiders (or other critters for the most part). I remember being about five, walking through the woods with my grandmother and seeing this beautiful thing hanging on a web. She tells me this story about how the spider can write your name in the web, and god will see it and if you've been nice to the spider, he will bless you.
Now, obviously, we ran across an argiope aurantia (fairly common "writing" spider). But I wanted to pet it so bad, but mamaw said that spiders don't like being petted, and god didn't mean for them to be touched.
The religion part didn't stick, but I remember being struck by the way the light through the trees made the spider glow a little. There was no fear for me, just this sense of joy that I had seen it.
But, while these little brown babies aren't as photogenic as most argiopae, my thought when I see them is cuddly because of how fuzzy they look lol.
No joke, if I close my eyes, I can still see that spider hanging there, suspended on gossamer in the sunlight, like some kind of magic.
Oh so the problem is they don't fear humans. Time to teach them a lesson.
Lmao!
@AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world @pics@lemmy.world That close my scream wouldn’t have been internal. Pretty chill dealing with arachnids and insects (apart from white tails which get the boot) but that’s in my gedditoffme zone so props.
I'm sure I didn't look chill!
Awh, she thinks you're warm and cosy
How does anyone accidentally get this on themselves?
They found a nice spot
I had just come back from walking the dogs. I'm going to guess a walker through a web, maybe lower down and it had been crawling up?
Yep, this is my call to block this sublemmy or whatever they are called. Too many spiders and creepy shit.
They're called communities.
Spiders are cool and all but I do have a personal rule of if it enters a certain radius around me, it is gonna fucking die.
I figure outside is their territory, and try to leave them be. I have to get rid of the black widows in my back yard because my dogs are dumb and will try to eat then, but otherwise leave them alone.