I have ‘a number’ of them in my conservatory – they don’t bother me, I don’t bother them, and we all get on fine.
They are shy spiders, and don’t have great vision, so bites on humans will almost certainly only occur in response to an immediate, direct threat. They are not aggressive either, and ‘mine’ all run back into their funnels if the vibrations on the web are clearly something bigger than they are happy dealing with (like a large, angry bee ripping the web apart as it crashes it’s way through it).
They do make impressively strong sticky webs, and mine aren’t especially good at cleaning up, so unless I do it, the husks and rinds of carcasses hang about for ages. I’ve had a few hatching’s, but most of the spiderlings seem to get eaten by the cellar spiders (Pholcus phalangioides)I have pretty much everywhere tho’ 😯
I actually rather like them as spiders go … I do carefully relocate any from inside the house to the conservatory however, as inside they are more likely to get squashed by something. Spiders generally take a crazy amount of flies – so they are very useful to have around.
S nobilis are becoming more and more common along the south coast – the UK radiation is speculatively linked to Torquay, from some time in the late 1800’s.
Severe reactions to bites are reported in the literature, but in most cases of severe reaction the species isn’t clearly enough identified, and in some cases there is an underlying condition too.
Almost all UK spiders are venomous, most simply lack the grunt to puncture human skin. The Steatoda aren’t a that big a genus, but you might well find S grossa and S bipunctata around too, (both superficially similar’ish looking, with very similar behaviors).
Dysdera crocata – the ‘woodlouse spider’ is physically able to bite humans too (but again, really only in response to direct threat) – I can’t recall it ever being written up as being medically significant tho’.
Spiders are great!
Posted 11 years ago
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