A Biblical Plague of Spiders

I have no idea where they came from, or how long they're planning to stay, but we have been invaded for the past few summers by herds of pesky daddy long legs spiders. I don't know why they have supplanted the more traditional house spider and why they feel they need to congregate in every corner of every room in our house but they are damn annoying. They don't even have the decency to spin a proper web, instead creating something which can only be described as "a big mess of spider silk" in virtually all corners of the house. We can easily collect and remove five or six on any given day we care to try (and by remove I don't mean carefully catch in a glass and place outside) with only a cursory search, occasionally as many as that per room. But a only few days later we may as well have not bothered. I do wonder if we could reach some sort of natural spider equilibrium where all available room corners have a spider in residence but I suspect they would just start stacking up and down the walls like they do in the garage. Don't get me started on the vast numbers of spiders in the garage!

We have even reversed our usual house spider removal policy in an unfortunately vain attempt to encourage some sort of inter species predation. I would have expected normal house spiders to jump at the chance to eat up a few of their spindly cousins but it seems they don't. Lazy bastards. If we could risk encouraging birds in to eat them up I'd probably be willing to give it a try, but this would begin the inevitable process of getting cats in to eat the birds, then dogs to eat the cats. At that point I'd probably just take the dogs out myself rather than wasting my time with cows and horses. If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure how effective a cow would be at eating a dog anyway. Unless it was a dog made of grass, but then how effective would a grass dog be at eating cats? I think I can guess that the answer to that is "Not very" without actually having to go to the bother of making one. I suppose I could just throw the grass dog repeatedly at the cats until they get the message they're no longer wanted but then I could equally well throw it in the bin myself when all the cats were gone, so I'm pretty sure that bovine intervention would not be required at any point. Which is just as well, imagine the mess they'd make.

Stick, our own in house bird, seems somewhat reluctant to rise to the challenge. Perhaps she's worried about the cats.

The peculiar spider invasion mystery becomes even more puzzling when I ponder what they might be eating. It's not like our house is full of flies like some giant spider supermarket. I mean, fair enough, we do get the occasional fly passing through like anywhere with open windows but as a rule we don't leave little piles of decaying meat and faeces all over the place so we don’t exactly get swarms in. You wouldn't think the few we do get wouldn't be enough to support the vast spider army that is occupying our house but clearly it is. Although now that I think about it I can’t remember any of the thousands of webs we've hoovered up having little mummified fly corpses wrapped up inside them. Could it be that they’re just eating each other?

Perhaps it’s some sort of spidery attempt to force evolve a race of super spiders. This would also explain why the regular spiders leave them so very much alone. Personally I’d probably have started with something a little more impressive but remember, as Darwin pointed out, from humble microbes mighty dinosaurs grow. You've got to admire their strategic thinking.

Yes, I am pretty bored at work today.