Noticing more spiders showing up in your home? That’s because it’s spider season in Washington.
As fall kicks in, spiders are crawling out of the woodwork as part of their yearly mating season in the Northwest.
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“What they’re looking for is some place to spend the winter, or a lot of male spiders looking for a female spider,” Richard Zack, a professor of etymology at WSU told KIRO Radio.
While females tend to stay put no matter the season, you’ll see plenty of males out in the open looking for a mate. Zack estimates that around nine out of every ten spiders you’ll see this time of year will be male.
“The males are basically like a group of guys on a pub crawl stopping at different bars to see if there are any girls in there,” entomologist Arlo Pelegrin told MyNorthwest. “That’s kind of what these spiders are doing, walking around houses, looking in cracks and crevices. The females stay pretty stationary. That usually means walking across kitchen floors or appearing in the middle of the floor while you’re watching TV.”
Cold weather also tends to push spiders of both genders indoors, either into homes or backyard sheds.
During this time of year, you’ll see an assortment of the 100 different species of arachnids that live in Washington, but this is also the only time of year you’ll see much of what’s known as the trapdoor spider.
Zack describes the species as "heavy-bodied," with a diameter about the size of a half dollar. Despite being a "pretty nasty looking spider," they're also generally considered to be harmless. There's one kind of spider you do need to be careful around, though.
“The only spider that is really dangerous is the black widow,” said Zack. You can easily recognize a black widow from the red, hourglass design on its stomach. Zack did note that “people rarely encounter” them in everyday situations.
They’re typically more prominent during this time of year whenever people are outside around wood piles, a natural habitat of black widows.
To deter spiders from your home, Pelegrin recommends oil — peppermint, tea tree or neem. To people, they smell fresh and pleasant. To spiders, the smell of peppermint, for example, is overwhelming and generally wards them off.
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