pholcidae/cellar spiders - care advice (picture warning)

[MadameButterface]

this sounds nuts, but if you are not a fan of the big hairy twats currently running around like maniacs giving everyone heart failure then I STRONGLY advise you to make friends with these babes, the spindly leggy bois who just hang around upside down in corners minding their own business. you may not think they look up to the job, but they eat the fat hairy fuckers. since I learned this, I have stopped escorting them off the premises and can report a downturn in heart stopping OH FUCKING JESUS FUCK style encounters.

anyway. so in the course of making friends with my enemy's enemy, I have found that the gentle, nice pholcidae spider is an attentive mother, staying with her babies until they have their first moult. I have one on my attic stairs who has 12 hatchlings with her. last time this happened (front room, bookcase) the mother was stuck there over a week with her babies and I started to get worried about her eating and drinking and so on. so, does anyone have any advice on how I can support her post partum (or whatever you call it for spiders). or should I just leave them all be? I want to encourage them, they're my house spider death squad. TIA

I lost all my cellar spiders last winter because it got down to -12 here and this draughty old house laughs in the face of insulation. I had cultivated a good extended family of leggies so it was pretty disappointing.

This week has been very, very bad for OHJESUS CHRIST NO types and I desperately need cellar spiders back. DH is away and the other night I had to send an SOS to the class WhatsApp for a rescuer. Oh the embarrassment.

Mind you, I found the legs of a cellar spider hanging out of the jaws of my Venus fly trap yesterday, so perhaps the cold winter wasn’t to blame after all.

It may have been a crane fly. Hard to tell.

It's bad luck to kill a leggy babe, I've heard. They're quite hard to hoover up too.

I've seen one polish off a hairy boi recently. They do it at spindly arms-length. They barely break a sweat. I'm scared of flies so I encourage them. S L A Y, girls.

I had to wrestle a big hairy one out the door last night when I found it sitting on my slipper. (Was NOT wearing them)

During the struggle ( I gingerly moved the slipper toward the front door, to escort it out) it got a fright and ran INTO my trainer. What if I'd not noticed and put my foot in there. 😱😱😱

I had to tip it back out my trainer and chase it towards the door with my slipper. FFS.

Send cellar spiders please!

Look what I horrifyingly saw last night in the light fitting when brushing my teeth!

Just had my first leggy babe encounter

I had a massive hairy spider in my room once when I was watching tv in bed late at night. I heard a rattling on a newspaper and nearly died. I don’t kill them. I managed to get it in the best fitting house I could find, which was a shoebox, and decided to leave it in there til the morning ( couldn’t be at sed going aaaall the way to the back door). Well yeah it wasn’t in the shoebox in the morning. Didnt sleep for a week

Aren't harvest spiders a bit different? Rounder, darker and flatter bodies and their legs are kind of straighter than cellar spiders and seem to make more of a circle when flattened against a wall or a plant. In terms of the household leggy ones, just found another one that had taken up residence suspended in a small shoebox that my DD had turned into a very pink and chi chi bedroom for a teddy some years ago. Definitely had a 'this is MY room' look about it!

ginger I think you have stumbled upon some spider sex. Theres more than 8 legs in that tangle..

@Singingitoverandoverandover Noooooooo!

We witnessed a quite brutal fight between a cellar spider and a daddy long legs the other day. It was viscous! The CS was wrapping the DLL in the web, over and over, while the DLL struggled to free itself. I don't usually like to interfere with nature but it didn't seem a fair fight at all so I removed the DLL and popped him out the window. I'm sure he was grateful.

Norma you will accrue some good karma for that. I can remember trying to pick moving flies out of webs as a child!