senator-awesomesause:

buggirl:

I think this is a powerful message.

Although, I don’t agree with labeling recluse as “murderous”- and the implied message that black widows would also be an exception to the heartfelt message.  

(I’m not sure of the source)

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that neither the poem, nor the comment above were written by people who grew up in Australia.

I think you’re probably right about that. The poem is by Nikki Giovanni; she and @buggirl are both American. (Well, Giovanni definitely is, and Andrea I believe to be, though I don’t actually know where she grew up.)

I’ve seen commentary that expresses a similar sentiment to the poem’s and to Andrea’s about the purported deadliness of Aussie fauna. That is, I’ve seen people assert that for all that the country does have venomous species, the risk to humans from Australian wildlife tends to be vastly overstated for humorous/hyperbolic effect. But I’ve never been there, nor researched the question in depth.

I can say, though, that largely as a result of Andrea’s influence I no longer feel compelled to smush the black widows in my garage, and at least so far it’s working out fine for both me and the spiders.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2bzWQm3.

Yay!

It has been a very good night in terms of my shipping of human/spider friendships.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1N6RG99.

So, of the estimated 2000 times buggirl​ has handled spiders with her bare hands (ranging from completely harmless species to black widows), she has been bitten exactly twice, each time when she was trying to hastily impose her will on an agitated captive. So it’s a 0.1% risk of her being bitten in any given spider-handling scenario.

Good to know.

Side note: In looking through some black-widow-handling YouTube videos, the comments were predictably YouTube-ian. But there also was this exchange, which made me laugh:

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1NgC2sT.