You may have noticed them scuttling across your laminate flooring, or dropping from the ceiling, fangs glistening, hairy legs outstretched, all eight of them.
If they’re not in your home yet, they will be. They’re coming, and this year according to reports, some are as big as rats. It’s spider season. Arachnophobes, be afraid, be very afraid.
Late August and early autumn mark the start of spider mating season, when millions of sex-crazed male spiders go looking for hook-ups and end up indoors.
For those of us unbothered by creepy-crawlies, it may all seem like a fuss but, having lived with an arachnophobe for over a decade, I can understand how terrifying this time of year can be. Our domestic peace is frequently punctuated by blood-curdling screams followed by hyperventilated demands of ‘kill it, kill it’. A glass and a sheet of paper usually suffices. The cat, cited by some as an anti-spider measure a household can employ, is uselessly uninterested.
Meg Skinner is an arachnid expert at the British Arachnological Society (BAS). She explains why this is a particularly spidery time of year.
“Spiders are around our homes and gardens all year round but now we are seeing a lot more house spiders in homes,” she says. “They are bigger, and they tend to wander around, rather than hide in corners. This is because the ones we encounter are usually males looking for females to mate with. The females generally stay in one spot in a corner.”