Those spiders you find inside may be of a type completely adapted to living indoors with humans. Putting one outside means death.
I made this mistake with a stink bug when it was winter. It was ok with being on the piece of paper I had it on. When I opened the door and the cold air hit it, it backed away towards me. I set it down and it stopped moving. Oops. :(
They’re cave-dwelling spiders. They still need a way to find new caves to inhabit. If they’re already settled in your house then they may not survive because you’ve interrupted their lifecycle. But new spiders are wandering in all the time. Those ones may have better luck finding a new house to move into (or coming right back into your house) because they haven’t been established yet.
Spiders are comrades in my ongoing extermination war against against mosquitoes.
Spiders deserve to live, Mosquitoes deserve to die
Even though I still have arachnophobia, I’ve intentionally lived with spiders for over a decade and I’ve not had issues with mosquitoes even if I left all of my windows open. And my roommates are thriving!
They’re very chill roommates, too! After about 1-2 months of adjusting to living together in my old apartment, they stopped spinning webs in the areas which I used frequently and focused on the zones which I left out for them - ceiling corners, gaps between walls and furniture, etc. I did occasionally clean up their old webs every now and again (while taking great care not to bother the spiders themselves) because they also gathered a lot of dust. But they’d replace the old webbing in a matter of days.
And they never developed overpopulation issues, even though I did see them producing egg sacks regularly. I was expecting to drown in spiders by the end of the first year of trying this arrangement, but I never counted more than 15-20 spiders apartment-wide.
Yeah I’ve always had similar arrangements with spiders. I don’t bother them if they don’t bother me. Wolf spiders chilling in my bathtub do get expropriated through the nearest window though.
Oh, wow! I’d probably just die if I ever saw a wolf spider in my tub! Like, complete simultaneous organ failure, the energy which is me would just eject from my body.
Lucky for me, I live in Temperate-Continental, so my biggest threat is seeing a Long-Legs dangling down to check up on me while I’m showering!
And I’m serious about this. Maybe it was just me imagining things, but I swear they started inspecting me every now and again. Like, I’d be at my desk playing, and I’d see one rapelling from the ceiling, like 20-30 cm away from me. Seldom has any descended onto the actual desk, though, they’d just hang for a bit, then climb back up. It was strangely comforting, though, it makes them feel a lot more alive and present than the mind would tend to think about an eight-legged thing right out of my nightmares. They really have become my roommates.
I did yelp. And it took me some time to trap it because I was terrified to touch it. I don’t have arachnophobia but I still find the big ones deeply unsettling
One thing to notice Most animals that are inside your house, are inside your house for a reason. And if you put them outside to “live” they will just die if they cannot return to a suitable environment with a reliable source of food and proper cover from the weather and predators.
So, sorry for taking away the guilt free feeling of putting an animal outside thinking it will live a long happy life in the wilderness.
