It\u2019s unlikely you have a spider the size of a penny prisoner in a Tupperware container on your kitchen counter. \u00a0Why do I? \u00a0We are holding the arachnid hostage until we know my daughter doesn\u2019t have any reactions to its\u2019 bite. \u00a0So far, there isn\u2019t any inflammation around the two little pinpricks on the back of our youngest daughter\u2019s leg. \u00a0Why the extra caution? \u00a0We live in Texas, which is home to the black widow and brown recluse. \u00a0Everybody who lives in the southern states knows the image of these poisonous spiders and thankfully this spider doesn\u2019t fit their description. \u00a0There\u2019s neither a red hourglass marking on its belly nor a dark violin-shaped marking on its head. \u00a0But, knowing deadly spiders lurk in the dark corners of Texas makes you suspicious of every spider you come across. \u00a0Some of you are so fearful of spiders that you won\u2019t even the write the word spider on a piece of paper let alone capture and release or even kill one. \u00a0Even me writing \u201cspider, spider, spider\u201d irritates you and makes your skin crawl like there are hundreds of \u2018em all over you. \u00a0I was once like you. \u00a0I could not have handled all of my spider experiences in Texas without having spent a summer\u00a0with\u00a0fellow undergraduate\u00a0biology majors at a research station\u00a0in the Rocky Mountains. \u00a0Willing to do anything to keep my 4.0 grade point average that summer, I volunteered\u00a0when a professor\u00a0needed help researching the mating behavior of Sierra Dome spiders in nature. \u00a0It turns out that the\u00a0Sierra Dome lady\u00a0spider is very smart, only choosing a mate that has proven himself to be a strong and vigorous fighter before her. \u00a0Boy spiders\u00a0actually progress through a series of fighting stages with the final one being a full-on brawl, sometimes to the death of the weaker contestant. \u00a0I didn’t believe it at first myself. \u00a0But, I\u00a0spent that summer alone in the forest with male spiders in petri dishes as my hiking companions searching for the dome-shaped webs\u00a0built by the lady spiders. \u00a0Creating a rivalrous love triangle, I’d carefully position two Romeos on opposite sides of the web, pitting them against the other to battle for the chance at procreation. \u00a0If you think that the Mayweather vs Pacquiao was the \u201cfight of the century” (before it actually happened, of course), then witnessing the incredibly entertaining fighting behavior of two Sierra Dome male spiders would be the \u201cfight of at least two centuries.\u201d \u00a0 And, this one\u2019s free \u2013 well, other than a plane ticket to Montana and some hiking books. \u00a0Having handled so many spiders in the lab and in the field so many summers ago, I can still now find the courage to capture and release and sometimes kill the spiders that trespass on the franch. \u00a0Most of the time, I let the spiders live as we all know the benefits of a spider\u2019s life, even if we don’t want to admit it. \u00a0But, I\u2019ve come face to face with creepy tarantulas and although I know they\u2019re harmless, I still kill \u2018em because I don\u2019t want them making a home in our kids\u2019 muck boots left outside the back door. \u00a0I wish I could say I never came across the dreaded black widow spider on the franch. \u00a0But, one evening late at night, I went out to the barn to check on all the animals with a flashlight. \u00a0Opening the gate to the cow pen, I decided to straighten their feeder, and as I approached it, the beam of my flashlight illuminated a black spider hanging upside down with a shiny red belly, on a thick, erratically built web between the feeder and the side of the pen. \u00a0I froze, staring at that hourglass like it was going to tell time. \u00a0Oh my goodness, it\u2019s the black widow. \u201cDon\u2019t think, don\u2019t think\u2026\u201d I repeated in my mind, as I knew what I had to do. \u00a0I grabbed a dusty bottle of insecticide from the barn shelf and turned on the outside barn lights. \u00a0Inches from the plump spider, I held my breath and started squirting it like crazy. \u00a0It fell to the ground. \u00a0And then, I anticlimactically finished it off with the heel of my cowboy boot. \u00a0One last squirt to its lifeless body and I started to breathe again. \u00a0Then, I screamed. \u00a0So, with that, you now understand why it’s no\u00a0big deal for me to have a spider trying to crawl up the slippery sides of the Tupperware next to me as I prepare lunch. \u00a0Hours later, the pinpricks have disappeared on my daughter\u2019s leg. \u00a0She asks me to let the spider go, outside. \u00a0It’s been forgiven. \u00a0The itsy bitsy spider is now free to go up the spout again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s unlikely you have a spider the size of a penny prisoner in a Tupperware container on your kitchen counter. \u00a0Why do I? \u00a0We are holding the arachnid hostage until we know my daughter doesn\u2019t have any reactions to its\u2019 bite. \u00a0So far, there isn\u2019t any inflammation around the two little pinpricks on the back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1035,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/1035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}