Simon Cole
Member
A few years ago I was moving logs around in my outbuilding when I got bitten by a European Cave Spider Meta menardi.
I started getting dizzy and hallucinating, and the bite took the next two years to fully heal. Not nice.
I now treat my arachnid landlords/overlords with a little bit more respect.
They live underneath all of my downstairs floorboards and I have a few inspection hatches to view them, and despite the floor falling apart, I have chosen to leave them be, preserving their habitat beneath me.
The problem seems to be that they are in some sort of social colony. The females each have a small territory of about 2 ft where they hang, and each protect an egg case above them.
When they detect a human passing underneath them, they will drop down and attack, thereby sacrificing themselves in order to protect the colony. But it is generally okay if you leave them alone.
So far as I am aware, they are the only spider to live in social colonies, but I could be wrong.
They get huge. I have seen all of the largest species of spiders in the UK (except the Fen raft spider), and I fear these ones the most.
My current colony must be well over a hundred individuals, and they rarely come out. But tonight was an exception...
One of the larger females had ventured up out of cracks in the floorboards earlier on, and she was setting up shop just below my bathroom sink. She has abdomen about as large as a 1 pence coin, and huge creepy legs with hairs all down them.
They rarely come up into my own habitat zone, so I presume she was either interested in man-habitat, or possibly chasing a small slug that was in my sink.
Anyway, here is a photograph of the cave spider currently in my bathroom, below.
There are hundreds more. I am tempted sometimes to open my house as a tourist attraction or register as some sort of protected wildlife site. Yikes!
I started getting dizzy and hallucinating, and the bite took the next two years to fully heal. Not nice.
I now treat my arachnid landlords/overlords with a little bit more respect.
They live underneath all of my downstairs floorboards and I have a few inspection hatches to view them, and despite the floor falling apart, I have chosen to leave them be, preserving their habitat beneath me.
The problem seems to be that they are in some sort of social colony. The females each have a small territory of about 2 ft where they hang, and each protect an egg case above them.
When they detect a human passing underneath them, they will drop down and attack, thereby sacrificing themselves in order to protect the colony. But it is generally okay if you leave them alone.
So far as I am aware, they are the only spider to live in social colonies, but I could be wrong.
They get huge. I have seen all of the largest species of spiders in the UK (except the Fen raft spider), and I fear these ones the most.
My current colony must be well over a hundred individuals, and they rarely come out. But tonight was an exception...
One of the larger females had ventured up out of cracks in the floorboards earlier on, and she was setting up shop just below my bathroom sink. She has abdomen about as large as a 1 pence coin, and huge creepy legs with hairs all down them.
They rarely come up into my own habitat zone, so I presume she was either interested in man-habitat, or possibly chasing a small slug that was in my sink.
Anyway, here is a photograph of the cave spider currently in my bathroom, below.
There are hundreds more. I am tempted sometimes to open my house as a tourist attraction or register as some sort of protected wildlife site. Yikes!
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. The scorpionidae again is a little bee sting, but the "claws" are incredibly strong. The giant Asian cave centipede, is the one that worries me 
dousing myself in peppermint oil forever haha