NOT for the arachnophobic!

In our garage lives some tiny livestock, including some geckos, some anoles, some daddy-long-legs, and various other spiders and bugs. The lizards keep a lot of the bugs in check but I think that most of the hunting that takes place in our garage is done by Annie Arachnid.

Annie lives here and has for the past three years. And BTW, "here" is immediately to the right of the back door to the house - the door we go in and out all day, every day - and behind a wall-mounted cabinet. Those are the grease-stained light switches for the garage lights and the control switches for the garage door openers you see.

Annie is a wolf spider ... or at least I'm pretty sure she is. I do know the only web she spins is the meager stuff you see in these shots. She's female because we've seen her carrying an egg sac in two different years. She only comes out at night to hunt and does a pretty good job of keeping the other spiders and such under control. I have even found little mummified geckos on the floor under her hole, so she's probably eliminating some of her competition, too.

She's actually rather pretty but she's shy and she's fast. In three years, this is the first time I've managed to get some shots of her. And she really does have eight legs but her right rear leg is under her and hooked over the edge of the hole in this shot. She must like it with us because she's stuck around and has grown up. In fact she's so big now that I had to cover over part of the motion detector on the garage door opener that turns on the light on the opener because she kept setting it off in the dark when she came out of her den. (It took me a while to figure out that the opener's motion detector was not messed up but was actually working just a little too well.)

Can you tell that no one in our house is arachnophobic?

(And as always, you can click it to big it with any of the pictures.)