last night in the garage, i saw a really big spider.
chris, always on the lookout for brown recluses (look up what happens when they bite and you'll understand why) was a bit concerned about it. me, always concerned that someone is going to smoosh a spider before i can intervene, went to work on getting it outside with the help of a tupperware container. (for the record, brown recluses are pretty small, we found out online. this one was a good 1.5 inches big.)
when i got down on the ground with a flashlight, i realized its body looked a little funny - like in the picture.
then i remembered how ed once said that he stepped on a spider and, when he lifted his foot up, all of a sudden there were 200 spiders. my first thought about that was that it was instant karma, but, much like scully, also figured there was a scientific explanation behind that -- and that explanation would be baby spiders.
so that's what i figured was going on here. sure enough, when i touched her body lightly, a bunch of baby spiders would scurry around, reassumbling themselves on her back.
i just wish it would've been light out so i could've snapped some pictures. instead, i had to be content with watching her for a while, then shooing her out of the tupperware and into the bushes.
:D i sure am happy that i could find a bunch of pictures of this online, though. "wolf spider babies" is the search string you'd want to check out. good picture, large view.
Love the Scully reference! Spiders, however, creep me out beyond belief and especially spiders with hundreds of babies on their backs. I can't believe you touched it! I would have freaked and climbed on a chair and cried until someone came to move it!
I'm Stacey. I'm a 31(!)-year-old Wisconsin girl living in sunny South Florida. The highlights in my life are my lovely boyfriend, my aloof cats, my adorable/adoring stepdogs, my two lumbering tortoises, select family members, being outside, being underwater, taking pictures, yadda yadda. Stay tuned for lots of babbling!
A small boy lived by the ocean. He loved the creatures of the sea, especially the starfish, and he spent much of his time exploring the seashore.
One day the boy learned there would be a minus tide that would leave the starfish stranded on the sand.
When the tide went out, he went down to the beach, began picking up the stranded starfish, and tossing them back into the ocean.
An elderly man who lived next door came down to the beach to see what the boy was doing. Seeing the man's quizzical expression, the boy paused as he approached. "I'm saving the starfish!" the boy proudly declared.
When the neighbor saw all of the stranded starfish he shook his head and said: "I'm sorry to disappoint you, young man, but if you look down the beach, there are stranded starfish as far as the eye can see. And if you look up the beach the other way, it's the same. One little boy like you isn't going to make much of a difference."
The boy thought about this for a moment. Then he reached his small hand down to the sand, picked up another starfish, tossed it out into the ocean, and said: "Well, I sure made a difference for that one!"