I have zero issues with spiders living in my home, they just have to stay out of my sight.
If they evolve to be better at hiding, it's a win win.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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I think this every time I kill a mosquito or fruit fly but they don't seem to be getting any faster, smarter, or quieter. Where's Darwin when you need him to answer some questions?
There's just so many that the relative few getting killed by swatting aren't having an impact on their genetics.
Also we've been doing it for millennia. The evolutionary pressure is already there. These are just the ones with the random mutations that make them slow enough to slap.
It's like asking why gazzel aren't fast enough to outrun a lion.
The reclusiveness selection argument makes sense, but why intelligence? Brains are crazy metabolically expensive, and I can't see why a smart reclusive spider would survive humans any better than a merely reclusive one.
It wouldn't. They just added that in there for the scaries and they probably didn't think it through much.
In our house the rule is spiders can stay if they're out the way (up high, etc). When they get too close for comfort for my wife's tolerance limits, I pick them up and put them outside. Spiders are friends.
That almost rhymed, how about:
In our house the spiders can stay
If they're out of the way.
If they get too close,
Then it's time to vamo(o)se
Spiderbro does an important job eating the more annoying bugs.
I have the same thoughts about hitting squirrels with my car.
Not that I do it on purpose or feel good about It, but I tell myself that at least the survivors will pass on their survivor traits to the next generation.
You'd think we'd have accidentally bred smarter deer by now
Deer kill more americans than any other animal. If anything they're becoming more top heavy and more lethal to make drivers hesitate before hitting them. Eventually evolution will make them explode and send a cloud of shrapnel out when struck by a car.
3310 Atomic Deer
Evolution will eventually turn all deer into adorable looking mooses with nokia cell phone exoskeletons.
Hehe, that was an unintentional Nokia reference on my side.
I only kill spiders without opposable thumbs
Whenever I see a spider in the house, I don't kill it. I do however, pick up my cat and say, "look dude, move out along before she figures out how to get to you. She will murder your ass."
The spider, always, leaves.
It depends also on the size. Not the same a cute jumper on the window or..
I don't kill spiders. They are my unpaid exterminators.
They accept payment in flies.
I catch them in a glass and cover the top with a piece of cardboard then dump them outside. Spiders eat bugs. Go be free little guy!
This is why you shouldn't kill rattlesnakes. If we kill the rattlesnakes that make themselves known, over time they adapt to not rattle before striking.
So they will be just called snakes.
I like smarter spiders, but not the cost of getting there.
fine by me. as long as i don't see them, they don't exist.
Any flies that fly into my house are given a chance to leave. If I can herd them out the window, they get to live and make lots of new baby flies.
On the other hand, their chances of getting a close up view of the fly swatter increase exponentially with every minute they spend refusing to leave and ignoring the fact that I'm literally showing them the exit.
I try to not kill them when i clean up excessive webs. Hope they appreciate the clean up and dont resent me for it...
I did the same for a while.
But then I recently found out a spider (which was getting pretty big) ignoring bloodless mosquitoes and letting them fill up on me before eating them. I cleaned it up.
Awww i dont judge my spiders merit to live based on their usefulness to me...
It took me seeing it free a mosquito from its web...
If I never know that the spider is there then we shall both live a peaceful life.
this isnt true tho. we kill loads of them without seeing them.
i like the idea tho
I eat seven spiders every hour
wow, you must be jacked
And cockroaches, too. They'll haul ass and scurry away every time. They know.
That's why I only kill the roaches that venture into my house, if I see a roach in the street I leave it alone to thrive that way all future offspring will be selected for street only living.
I’ve gotten brave in my old age. I only relocate them if they become extremely inconvenient …like my doorway spider (sorry frank). I ignore house spiders entirely as they transit my house. Good luck, leggy friend.
I have a pretty orb weaver on the porch (or I did last summer). Hope I get another.
Same, I had two Joros this year. Their webs are LITERALLY gold, it's so cool. They really just chill. Imagine my disappointment when both disappeared before the New Year and I learned their lifespans. :(
Those are beautiful. Not native where I am. It reminds me of the “banana spiders” where I grew up. There used to be these big, majestic nests of them. I ran face first through one as a kid. Definitely a core memory.
Not native here, either, but supposedly not a real threat to anything. They're everywhere here now. Coolest thing I learned is that their babies can "balloon" and fly for up to hundreds of miles on wind currents. And the little tiny baby spider in the web isn't a baby, it's the little bitch-ass male. The size difference is insaaaane.
Poor male spiders in the web with big mama 😢
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Huh, coincidentally,I just finished reading Children of Time
Birds also only eat spiders they see. Not sure how that’s any different
You're forgetting all the spiders that crawl into the bird's mouth while it's sleeping.
Nah that's just spiders beord throwing off the averages.
Also, any effects we may have on arthropod selective evolution by randomly killing visible spiders is going to be vastly overshadowed by the very rapid and immediate changes we're making to the environment broadly.
We would need somewhere between centuries or millennia of very predictable and consistent behavior killing visible spiders before we saw any change to their overall behavior, meanwhile we've all but destroyed the ecosystem at their scale anyway, which is going to have vastly more dramatic impact on populations and evolution, assuming they survive at all.
When was the last time any of you remember getting your windows covered with bugs after a summer drive?
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