Reflections of Mortality

Reflections of Mortality
Originally uploaded by jstevewhite

I hate spiders. A LOT. I hate them the way slugs hate salt. And of all the spiders I'm ever likely to meet, I hate Loxosceles Reclusa the most. They're just evil. You can tell in this picture just how evil they are.

The discovery of a big mother brown in our bathtub led me to cruising the internet looking for information on this beauty. Turns out the only way to be SURE is to count their eyes. I have a couple of images that allow me to do so, and she has six, in just the right places. Anyway, after spending way too much time on sites about spiders that had .edu in the URL, I learned more about browns that I ever wanted to know. Including lovely trivia like, they can live in a sealed box with no food or water for over a year. That's when I decided they're evil.

The sites often question the brown's reputation for producing disgustingly damaging bites, but there was enough waffling that I'm not ready to discount their bite as potentially SUCKING out loud.

This one got stuck in a plastic bowl that I had left under the toilet's shut off valve after replacing it, just in case it dripped. When I came back upstairs and checked for drips a couple days later, I found this scene. Her body is 3/4" long, and the long leg span you see there approaches three inches. Well, it did. I followed this up by flushing her and her dinner down the toilet.

Because I'm so scared of them, I have to take their pictures. It's a compulsion. I'm not sure why, and paging through my photos gives me the willies sometimes. But I kinda liked the way this image turned out, anyway.