I don’t like your usual spiders, but I think these guys are fascinating, smart, charming little chaps. I have one patrolling my laptop as we speak. Darned contraption still has bugs, though.
You mean a spider/camel cricket?
They’re also very friendly, before they pre-digest your insides and suck them out.
A co-worker spent some time in Iraq and always talks about these guys~
We always have a few of the camel/spider crickets in our home. Nothing to panic over until one jumps on your bare ankle when you walk into the kitchen. The Chinese people believe that crickets are good luck so we just leave them be.
Well, Nano has not yet confirmed that these are the beasties he’s talking about, but they are common in my basement, particularly in the Fall. I ignore them mostly.
How many Chinese people do you have in your kitchen, Mute?
I don’t know. “Those Chinese are an especially tricky people!” - Uncle Duke
Camel spiders and camel crickets are very different fellows, camel spiders aren’t spiders but camel crickets are crickets, calling them spiders isn’t really cric…
No, I mean jumping spider. Just like in the title. Salticidae family. MTGuru showed he knows of them by the pic he posted. I lay certain odds that you’ve seen them in some kind, Emm, because they are common and have near-worldwide distribution, are questing hunters who demonstrate nonaggressive curiosity, aren’t particularly secretive or wary of humans, and do well in houses. For locomotion they don’t so much walk; they shuffle briskly in fits and starts. It’s odd, but I think of them as polite. But lest you get the heebie-jeebies about them being underfoot, rest safe in the knowledge that here in North America they tend to be tiny, which is I suppose part of the appeal - and a good thing for everyone it is, too, because a spidery thing that can jump amazing distances and is the size of a mouse would probably drive me to buy a gun. But they don’t get anywhere near that big, so it’s moot.
Here’s a pic of one much like the sort you might come upon motoring around my pad:
…Only now scale it down to tiny. Tiiiiiiiiiiny. As in size-of-a-fennel-seed tiny.
And did I mention nonaggressive? To humans, anyway. I put my fingertip close to the little feller I mentioned, and he backed away quick. I put it close to him again and he said, “Screw this,” and jumped away out of sight, to be left to hunt in peace. That’s typical behavior. But sometimes you can get them to sit on your hand, too; they don’t particularly care about you so long as they’ve decided you’re not a menace, but they’ll have a look at you to make sure. They’re just busy looking for proper, tinier things to eat, and you’re simply another surface that’s as good as any. Doughty little fellows.
My place isn’t infested with them, BTW; I might only see a couple or so in a week. I figure they’re eating things I’d rather not have around.
Piers Anthony wrote a book a year and a bit ago, Castle Roogna, in part about a jumping spider named “Jumper,” he wrote a more recent book about a descendant of Jumper called “Jumper Cable” I believe.
That name didn’t take much heavy lifting. Piers must be losing his mojo.
Some of Pier’s humour has always required a certain lack of sophistication to fully appreciate.
Ah, I see.
Pardon me - I should go trim my nose hairs.
Well there’s his books Night Mare, about a horse named Mare Imbrium, seems a bit moony to me and there’s Centaur Aisle, not to mention Roc and a Hard Place…
Say, isn’t there a movie? Snakes on a Plane of Existence or something.
quite a bit… published July 1979 