A very nicely written blog entry!
I will never forget the first time I saw a D. crocata spider. I grew up looking for bugs every day of my life, but didn't see my first specimen of this species until I was a young teenager. The memory is a little vague but I was planting some flowers under a large rhododendron bush in the backyard and there was a row of bricks that bordered the edge of the small garden at the base of the bush. I had moved a few bricks and this large (by Oregon standards) red spider came over the edge of the brick near my hand. I'd never seen a spider like that before. I admit to killing it immediately without even thinking twice about it. (It was another ten or so years before I "grew up"
and really started to find spiders interesting.)
Well, the remains of this spider sat there on the brick for several days before it disappeared. It creeped me out a bit because it just seemed so out of place in my Portland backyard, and I walked past it repeatedly. I showed my parents and anybody else that would look. It was years later that I learned that this spider was non-native, just like it's food--the pill bugs (AKA roly-poly bugs) that it followed over here from Europe where they are known as woodlice and this spider is the "woodlouse hunter". They have disproportionately HUGE chelicerae (fangs) which is part of what makes them so unsightly to non-lovers of spiders.
Another time maybe 14 years or so ago, I was taking a photo of this species on a desk in my computer room at the time and it crawled off the side of my desk where I spent hours sitting each day and disappeared. I was a little creeped out about that, but that was a spider-infested house and I don't mean that like a person that is afraid of spiders but like a person that was bitten and put on antibiotics for it a few times in the span of one summer there. It didn't help that the neighbor lady said her husband lost his leg to a spider bite in that neighborhood. Of course, now I'm very skeptical that he lost his leg to an actual spider bite, knowing as I do what species was infesting that neighborhood now and that it is a relatively harmless species. And I also know that the antibiotics were not necessary since I was bitten by a spider again last summer and went in to get antibiotics for the same symptom (red line on surface of skin running towards heart) and he told me to go home and take some Benadryl and chill.
In fact, many of my earliest (and most recent) memories revolve around or involve various "bugs".
Thanks for sharing your blog!
