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Also!!!! I do want to give a shout out to my sister for being a my camera man! Camerawoman? Eh.

It is much easier to handle things when I can use two hands instead of one. So having her there made things a lot easier. She is scared of bug tho so most of these are taken from further away and had to be zoomed in.

Starting off strong with a uhh… I honestly have no clue. I scooped it out of the water. It’s genuinely surprising that I’ve not been bitten or stung or harmed in some way while intentionally handling things until now.

The spider is also a mystery spider! It looks like it’s some kind of orb weaver considering where I found it and (even tho you can’t see it in that image) it had a very decorative backside. But it was hairy! Which I don’t see with them very often!

Okay, I did some quick research. The first bug is a Water Scorpion! And I’m pretty sure our spider friend is a Green Lynx Spider.

So, I actually found three of these guys while out tromping around! These are all of the same one I found, but she’s a Castleback orbweaver! Very cool looking spider. I didn’t bring any containers to bring critters back home otherwise… she would likely be frozen.

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And if you can’t tell, I love handling bugs and spiders and do it very regularly with little to no hesitation! This is because I have grown very confident in being able to ID the dangerous bugs in my area and being able to read their body language! In the many years I’ve been handling bugs, I’m really going to emphasize spiders here because that’s what most people are afraid of, I’ve never been bitten or stung while intentionally handling a single one of them!

Of the hundreds, if not thousands of spiders I’ve dealt with, never once, have I been bitten. I really want to emphasize this.

Because today was a first and I was bitten while handling a spider. One of these castleback orbweavers actually. And, I’m usually the person to look back and assume that this means I handled the spider incorrectly and scared her into biting but… this was two seconds before she bit me.

There is no pressure, I’m not actively chasing her with my other hand, and she isn’t getting pinched in any way. By all means, I was handling her correctly.

Why did she bite? Honestly, I don’t know. There are lots of reasons.

It could have been my hands were shaking or maybe there was wind. Or I pinched her on accident before. Or she was still upset at me for plucking her off of her web (I was careful not to damage it so I could place her back). I generally like to leave web spiders, especially orbweavers, alone because I don’t want to damage webs and the second they are out of their web they feel significantly more threatened by everything. (Why I prefer handling wolf spiders)

The most likely reason she bit was because she was overwhelmed. And I can’t blame her for that.

The truth is, even when a spider does bite, it is only defensive! A spider will never go out of its way to harm. I’m aware of the risks I take when I poke around spiders and honestly surprised it’s taken this long for me to get bitten.

Did it hurt? I mean… sorta? It felt like a fire ant bite for like a second and then I was fine. But significantly better than a fire ant bite because I’m fine today, no itch or bump. Almost like… getting poked playfully by your friend with a sewing needle?

I’ll be honest, it was more startling than anything else.