A couple years ago I had an experience with a spider that entirely changed my perspective on them and most insects, and now I make a conscious effort to help them as much as possible, instead of kill or even repel them.
This particular spider kept running back and forth between my monitor and a window, and when it'd get to my monitor, it would wave its front legs at me. If I moved to the left, it would run across to the left side of the monitor and waves it legs again. If I stood up and moved closer to it, it would run back to the window, turn around, and waves its legs at me. From watching YouTube too much, I was always under the impression that this was either a sign of aggression or a defensive stance.
But after a few times of going back and forth like this, I realized there were approximately 50 baby spiders around a light by the window, which had been closed since the previous day. Normally this would be a nightmare for me (I've always had a fear of spiders), but after a while, I had this crazy notion that the spider was trying to get me to open the window. So I did, and it immediately ran to the babies, wrapped a single strand of silk around the old webbing, and started dragging swaths of the babies' webbing toward the window.
I have no idea if the room was just dry and they needed some humidity, or if the food had been too scarce for too long. Whatever it was, that parent spider was in full blown panic mode, and managed to effectively communicate their problem to a human. I haven't killed any spiders or insects since (aside from a few particularly asshole-ish mosquitos), and actually keep small water dishes in my bathroom for two spiders who've now lived with me for nearly a year. If any babies hatch inside and get close to me, I use my phone's flash to guide them back to a corner with a light on -- they are seemingly always drawn to the brightest light source.
Spiders are incredible creatures, and I deeply regret not realizing that sooner.
I had a similar experience with a spider who had made an egg sack in a precarious spot along our back door that was definitely in hazard's way. I got a stick and a leaf and tried to detach and move her setup to a nearby spot that would be safer. She did not like that.
At one point in the move, she got left behind and I ended up with just the egg sack to move. You could feel the panic and protective instinct in her movements. I got her onto the leaf and reunited with her eggs on a nearby plant and she quickly went to work finding the right spot and securing her sack to the underside of one of its leaves.
I watched her there for a while in her new location, and there is absolutely more than just instinct at play.
I didn't grow up liking spiders much, but gardening in particular has given me a new perspective on them. One measure of our garden's health is the amount of spiders we see, keeping other would-be pests in check.
I had to do the exact same thing once -- the mother ran off as I tried to gather her and the sac into a box -- and you could see both the panic as she watched the sac being taken away, and the relief when she was reunited.
Not OP. I think the brain is more a receiver of consciousness than a generator, and there are many types of receivers, beyond neural cells.
Trees will form a network with the cooperation of fungi, to exchange information and nutrients among each other. Plants will grow better when they are planted with companion plant, or cultivated in guilds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_(ecology)
Humans … or I should say, modern humans have a bias towards consciousness structured as language. So yeah, it doesn’t normally occur to people that mind-to-mind contact can come in other forms. Among the (obviously non-techie) friends and communities who experiment and cultivate skills like these, using a visual channel for communicating with animals, plants, and insects is a thing. One example I heard, was a shaman telling me how she communicated to her dog that they will be gone a few days. Dog don’t understand clock time like we (modern humans) do. Dogs do understand the rising and setting of the sun though. Three of the rising and setting sun would be three days.
In the visionary shamanic community, we might call these intelligences animal, plant, or insect teachers.
Spiders have a special, very profound medicine. Many beings are afraid of them, and moving through that fear is part of the test to learn from the spider teacher. There is something similar with snakes. The venom is transformative.
I noticed too that you talk about pioneer plants and you seemed to have skill at foraging. I’ll make a bold assertion that’s out of place for this forum: I think that a civilization that are organized around local food resiliency and sovereignty using such things as permaculture design can free up the time for humans to really explore consciousness. It requires time and awareness and not better machines and technology.
Feel free to contact me by email if continue this conversation interests you. Talktohosh on gmail.
As a parent I can say that a lot of urges in parenting come from somewhere deep and intuitive, rather than as a result of some higher level erudition on the situation.
Still, the urge for care ones young, while not necessarily very - cerebral? - at least creates a feeling of familiarity and connection - ie. empathy. When this empathy comes across from an arthropod to a higher mammal it's still humbling and awe inspiring, even though it might tell more of our autonomous nature than the intellect of the arhtropod.
It feels like there’s some interplay between instinct/emotion and intelligence/decision-making in the behaviours we’re describing, which I felt was a sign of awareness or consciousness.
I wouldn’t say what I experienced was much more than instinct and making a new web, but the emotional response of a mother protecting its young was relatable across very different species, which is useful for building empathy and respect.
The examples in the article are much more interesting from an intelligence standpoint though.
But babies don't logically reason that crying is how to express their pain, it is instinct. The error was downplaying instinctive behaviors as separate from the total consciousness. Basically equating all instinctive action to the knee reflex test: harmless reactions that our bodies happen to do, rather than the essential part of our psyche that most instincts are.
"Conscious thought" is an undefined term applied to non-verbal subjects, except where sequential reasoning is demonstrated, and then becomes a metaphysical morass. Emotion is well-defined and interpretable from behavior, and is not the opposite of instinct, but a pathway it operates by.
At that point isn't it a bit a matter of semantics? I do agree with your point though. I think the way we think of instincts is far too simplistic and lacks an appreciation for how complex, adaptive, and context-aware instincts are
This is something I’ve thought about quite a bit. IMO, emotions are probably the drivers for “instinct”; are nature’s way of getting organisms to do things.
There's something that gets to me anytime I see animals with their offsprings.
A documentary about octopuses last moments in life, really shook me. It might be interpretation/anthropomorphism but anyway, apparently after laying eggs, the octo mom will breath out water (warmed by her body) around them. The process lasts a while and when she's exhausted she spends the remaining energy to swim as far as possible and die. The theory being she'd rather not attract predators with her corpse. A final step in sacrifice.
I too now try to redirect life forms to where they can live better. I used to seriously arachnophobic but nowadays I can manage grabbing a box or a long piece of paper to move insects around or outside if needs be.
Fascinating. Thank you. I'll think about this for a few days, it feels.
And on topic, I hate small house insects. They bother the hell out of me. So, spiders I treat very well and while not welcoming them in, when discovered I'll find them a new home outside rather than kill them. But then, I don't live in Australia..
Hah, it is actually the same in Australia. It helps to know that the bigger spiders are usually more friendly. The problem then is more that they can be quite quick. Which can be terrifying when trying to capture them to move them outside.
A lot of spiders have spread with humans and, depending on your environment, would probably not be able to survive outside. I usually ignore spiders I see in my house. I figure for every spider that's probably at least 3 less other bugs. One time we even let a daddy long legs care for its babies and watched as the hundred little eggs finally matured and hatched. Most of those babies probably died, but those that survived have probably helped keep the population of many other bugs down
I was thinking of this exact documentary when reading the comment above.
It was fascinating how the octopus seemed to have trust and opened up to him.
Disagreed with his reasoning when she was being attacked - if she’s a friend, help her. Sitting back and recording her getting hurt because he didn’t want to “interfere with the natural processes” didn’t make much sense.
I used to let spiders live freely in my house, until one time I wanted to go to bed at night and noticed dozens of black spots on the bed cover. I looked up and saw hundreds of tiny spider babies on the ceiling. From then on, whenever I see a spider in the house I get rid of it. Sorry...
Don't get me wrong, I still find families of baby spiders to be absolutely terrifying in every way, and it takes every bit of my willpower to fight the urge to remove them from existence. But at the end of the day, the key word is family. It's a group of living things, with parents that apparently have the emotional capacity to care about them.
Hopefully when you say "get rid of it," that means gently coaxing them into a box and putting them outside.
You are assuming very human or even mammalian qualities and constructs like "parents/family/emotion" to invertebrates that have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates. If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion.
If they had "no problem" cannibalizing their offspring, they'd quickly go extinct! In reality, cannibalizing of offspring only occurs in particular circumstances - if conditions are poor enough that most of the young won't survive anyway, for example. In which case their instincts kick in to cannibalize as a way to recoup the energy and try again at a better time. If conditions are right there will instead be a strong instinct to protect the egg sack / young.
> If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion.
That's how predators act. Yet, we have no lack of love for birds and cats.
Anyway, don't group spiders on the "have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates". They are much more complex than that. Besides some vertebrates also have no problem doing that.
Yes, and "Rugby players eat their dead" (true story, 1972 plane crash, subject of several books, etc. [1])
Just because you can't readily see the emotion, does not mean it is not there.
True to say that 'we don't know if they regret having to eat their young/mates', but saying they don't care is just as much making assumptions as saying they do regret it, merely switching the polarity.
It is also possible that eating the mate/being eaten is the most loving thing it can do, giving not only the DNA but also their entire stored energy for the good of the offspring. Or, they might be terrified. Or, they might not be sufficiently sentient to notice. Either way, what we know is that we don't know (tho there may be someone who's studied it enough, IDK).
I've always heard that story as a soccer team, and I'm just now realizing it was probably because someone down the line didn't want to explain Rugby to Americans in the 70's.
sorry, what? The claim that "parents/family/emotion" are constructs which are limited to (higher) mammals rests on the assumption that these constructs are dependent on i.e. a highly developed cerebral cortex-- and that somehow the cortex is the seat of emotions.
Given that neurotransmitters (adrenaline?) are so instrumental to regulating emotional state, that claim seems highly unlikely.
The most plausible possibility is that all multi-celled beings have some sense of family and parenthood.
And here with the spiders you are presented with evidence of such.
Does a mother spider feel distress with quite the same level of nuance as a mother human? Perhaps not. Is she clearly distressed? absolutely.
I think the horrifying thing about humans is we do understand what we’re doing and choose to do it anyways. Spiders kill things to eat them to survive. Humans do it for much more complicated or arbitrary reasons.
I can't speak for spiders but there are plenty of animals that do horrible things for reasons other than eating and surviving. Seals come to mind (with what they do to penguins). Also cats.
At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.
Attention isn’t binary. Stubbing your toe is a great way to pay a lot of attention to something you normally ignore, but conversely we are paying attention to the lack of pain without it diverting any effort.
Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.
Oh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem.
Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No.
Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
oh my cat don't even eat the animals it brings back inside the house. Birds, baby rabbits (these ones survives for it can catch them but not kill them), lizards by the metric ton, spiders, mice...
It brings them back to me and let them in the living room.
Sometimes I get two animals a day.
I don't know: maybe the cat understood we do the cooking and somehow thinks we're going to cook all it brings back.
I remember an old blog where some coder who also had a relentless cat (I'd say at least 10 years ago) set up face a webcam and face recognition for its cat inside the pet door and wouldn't let the door open if the cat had something in its mouse.
> I remember an old blog where some coder who also had a relentless cat (I'd say at least 10 years ago) set up face a webcam and face recognition for its cat inside the pet door and wouldn't let the door open if the cat had something in its mouse.
I've got to find that blog post! Luckily my cats don't bring back half a dozen animals a day anymore but I'm still tired of chasing squirrels and mice around my house once a week.
> Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem.
Not every animal is like this. Most spider never kill animals they can't eat if they're not a threat to them. If one such creature falls into their web, they just release it.
>Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out
How else are they gonna eat? They don't have teeth with which to chew their food like we do.
>Cats play with their food.
Many cats can be sadistic selfish assholes, but somehow many humans love them to death because they're cute and fluffy.
Human industrial slaughter where animals are trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) would beg to differ. Or how about male chicks being liquefied and fed back to the chickens?
Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter.
This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
When I was a kid, one day my dad took me to the nearby "meat shop" where they use to slaughter goats in a nearby room of the shop. My dad's aim was to prepare me to go to the meat shop on my own in the near future. What I saw had a very deep impact on me and I decided to not eat meat and fish after that. It took me one and a half years to stop eating meat and fish. What I saw in that shop that day was chilling. Two goat kids were slaughtered in front of their mother(the goat). The goat kids had by now realised that going inside the room meant death, so when the shop owner tried to take the first goat kid into the room the goat kid refused to enter the room and the owner kept pushing and forcing the goat kid inside the room. Seeing this the customers gathered around the shop started laughing. And the goat(the mother of the goat kid) couldn't look at her kid being taken to the slaughter room and was crying for help looking at the laughing customers(I had never heard a goat make such loud and chilling noises)! The same repeated for here second kid. And finally the goat herself was slaughtered after sometime.
Experiencing this horror, I decided there and then that I will not eat meat and fish again to satisfy my tastebuds. It has been years since I left eating meat and fish. But even now when I see non-vegetarian dishes(at home or other places) I have urge to eat non-veg. It is very difficult to leave eating non-veg; it is like addiction. But everytime I have that urge to eat non-veg, that scene from the meat shop plays in front of my eyes. It is very painful.
Another scene that I regularly see in my local area every morning is when cattles are transported in a truck to a near-by mass slaughter house. The trucks are enclosed from all sides with just a slit open for the cattles to look outside so that they do not panic in the metal enclosure. Looking at their eyes one can easily see that they are trying to understand where they are and what is happening. And everytime I see that I say to myself, these unsuspecting defenceless animals are going to face a gruesome death within an hour just to satisfy the appetite of some humans!
>trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures)
There is absolutely push/incentive to monitor and correct for failures in stunning. The stress response it entails in the animal makes for poor quality meat, or even inedible meat that would have to thrown out.
Also, stunning is followed by slaughtering and draining. There is no situation in industrial production in which an animal would be dismembered and skinned alive.
Painlessly slaughtering cattle isn't trivial. You want to destroy their brains as close to instantly as possible, but their brains are tiny and their skulls are large, so it really requires care to make sure the animal is instantaneously killed.
I would completely support requiring direct expert supervision of every single animal slaughtered. This is the norm at the smaller operations, but something like 80% of US cattle are slaughtered at giant Chinese owned factory stockyards.
Forget the actual slaughter. They live their entire life in a torture cage, smeared in excrement, ears filled with the screams of their suffering family.
Exactly, they don't have empathy. We have conscience yet we all these. So who is lacking empathy emotion tell me. We do much worse than any animal can do. Again go watch the docu to see completely to know what we do before replying. Humans are worst thing in universe because we do all these having conscience.
It's worth mentioning to check the species first before putting them back out. Some spiders are house spiders, and can't really survive outdoors. I generally put them into my garden shed or, if possible, into the loft instead, but most of the time, I just leave them alone.
My knowledge on it is pretty basic, but as I understand, house spiders are adapted to living indoors: climate, food supply, and so forth. It's probable that over time spiders adapted to live in caves or tree hollows probably found it quite easy to move into dwellings, and stay there, to the extent that now some species have their entire life cycle based around dwellings.
[Edit: I googled around, and this was an interesting article from Rod Crawford, the curator of arachnid collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Seattle talking about house spiders being traced back to Roman times. https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology... ]
No, they evolved to become synanthropic. That's usually a good deal for a species unless humans change their ways. The black cellar beetle was very popular in Europe living in preindustrial era because it lived in wooden buildings and is now endangered because these buildings are becoming rare.
Generally they can live just fine in the wild somewhere, and human indoor climates merely replicate their natural habitat. Odds are without shelter or clothing or other artificial methods of controlling temperature you'd be pretty screwed wherever you currently live too.
A tip if you are scared of spiders: Trap them in a glass, then slide some hard surface underneath. You can now move the spider (like out a window) while holding it trapped with the lid.
This has actually eliminated much of my arachnophobia, since I find myself studying the spider, safely confined inside the glass before letting it out. (This is actually one way they treat phobias clinically, a kind of desensitization exercise)
I used to have extreme arachnophobia, like strip-naked-run-screaming-if-I-found-a-spider-on-me level arachnophobia. A long time ago I was prescribed propranolol for PTSD by a psychiatrist specializing in trauma. I hadn't even mentioned my arachnophobia to her or any clinician I had seen at that point. It helped me a lot of social situations, but the effect was pretty subtle.
Anyway, one day, I was hiking with friends, and someone pointed out I had a bug on me. I picked it up and realized it was a spider -- and then it dawned on me that I wasn't afraid of it at all. It was one of the most thrilling moments of my life to hold a spider without any fear at all. I started seeking out spiders to handle them. Even after I stopped taking that medication, the effects lasted. Nowadays I love spiders.
I learned years after stopping taking it that this medication has been studied both for PTSD and phobias -- specifically arachnophobia.
Your comment made me think to tell this story because I pretty much always attempted to bring spiders outside rather than kill them despite my fear. My rational side knew that most spiders are harmless, sensitive, and highly beneficial creatures. Plus I always hated killing anything and still do. But the exposure didn't actually reduce my fear of them noticably. And that experience is borne out in the research -- exposure therapy doesn't seem to be enough for most people
Apparently propranolol is effective because it works on memory consolidation -- more or less it helps with overwriting old negative memories (more specifically the emotional charge that accompanies the memory) with newer positive ones.
People with arachnophobia should remember that 95% of the extant spiders are totally unable to pierce the human skin. Fangs too weak or short to reach blood capillaries and made any real damage, even if they would be poisonous doesn't matter. Those that coevolved with spider-eating monkeys are the problematic ones.
I couldn’t care less whether the spider is dangerous or not.
It’s more the erratic, jittery movements of spiders and their multitude of fast legs that’s off-putting.
Especially when you’re taking a dump in a dimly-lit outdoor toilet and notice there’s a hand-sized huntsman spider a few inches from your knees. I have never sprinted so fast.
My understanding is that most people never see a brown recluse, even within their natural range. Those who do see them probably don't recognize them most of the time, because they're not especially big, because from a distance they look pretty much like any other brownish spider, and beause neither the human nor the spider generally want to get close enough to make a positive identification possible.
But it so happens that I've seen a lot of them, so I offer some trivia about that.
I saw hundreds when I was 12 and my father and brother and I were hired by a neighbor to tear down a shack on his property. It so happened that there were hundreds of recluses in the shack. I know because I was nerdy twelve-year-old with a fascination with wildlife and field guides, and I had a pretty nice little field guide with a good image and description of brown recluses.
I've seen many more of them in the house I live in now. I've been in this house for about fifteen years now. There are a lot of brown recluses living in it. I've seen many dozens of them over the years. The last time my daughter came to visit us, she found four or five of them during the week she was here. She's a little arachnophobic, but not too badly, and the experience hasn't diminished her enthusiasm for visiting We expect her to be back in a few months.
According to Wikipedia and other sources I've read, they rarely bite--generally only when they're being mashed against someone's skin hard enough to frighten them but not hard enough to kill them. When they do bite, it rarely causes any symptoms. When it produces symptoms, they're usually minor--most often sores on the skin; less often some necrosis of the skin.
The bite _can_ cause much more serious symptoms, but that's rare.
I had a bite once living here that might have been from a brown recluse. My doctor was skeptical, because the bite didn't look quite right. It produced a small, tender sore and a really large inflamed area around it. I didn't notice it at all until a relative noticed it on my back. That's consistent with reports of brown recluse bites: most often people don't feel the bite when it happens. Their fangs are quite small--usually they aren't able to pierce fabric--and the venom itself is painless; it's the later effects--if any--that become painful.
At any rate, I and my relatives seem to have reconciled ourselves to living with a large infestation of brown recluses.
Yeah, as I mentioned in my post, I knew this rationally but it didn't help my phobia. If phobias could be rationalized away I suspect many if not most people who have them would overcome them fairly easily
With that I can easily pick them up and drop them out the window or whatever. You can do it at well over arms' length too. It doesn't seem to harm them, as there's a space within the grabbing cage that they get directed to. Small spiders can crawl out between the cage bits but usually stay on the end long enough to move them elsewhere. Big spiders are fully caught.
My favorite is a vacuum. Just use it with the handle extension mode and bare floor setting. When you get near them, due to the air movement they try to hold on tighter to the wall and don’t move, which makes it easier.
I am always scared of injuring the spider with the slide method. I have hit upon a method which is much simpler, and rather satisfying to execute.
Wait until the spider is stationary. Put the glass on its side with the mouth directly in front of the spider. Then - tickle the spider's behind. Invariably the spider will panic-run forward, right into the glass. Lift the glass and there you have it! Spiders can't climb the smooth sides so no lid necessary.
I have found that persuading the spider to enter the glass without tickling its behind to be much more challenging for some reason. They sense the trap, or at least that it's a sterile dead end. But startle them, and they'll always run forward in a straight line.
This could be useful for that [1]. It has a thing to catch the creature and a built-in magnifier. The video showing how to use it is amusing--those two kids have great expressions.
House spiders usually cannot live outside. So you're also most likely killing them by escorting them outside (I do this too btw, because I don't want to crush them, but I know that outside is likely not better for them).
I'm the resident "bug remover" at the office and at home, since they really don't bother me. I do it, but feel bad about putting a spider outside in the middle of the winter.
No problems from me! My policy is generally live and let live. But once they invade my space I take measures.
Unfortunately, my wife is phobia level scared of spiders. So now if they bother her, by extension that is bothering me, and so I take measures to make sure they don't bother her.
But I motorbike commute every day with webs around my dash/handlebars. I wish my little spider bro good luck every ride.
most of those babies will probably die on their own anyways. If they do survive to adulthood it's only because they managed to kill some other bugs. So it'd be a net of less total bugs in your house if you just let them be
Mothers love is the primal force of the universe. Not just mammals (including humans, of course but read up on other vertebrates such as crocodiles and birds). Another poster mentions gastropods (octopus).
You see it in plants. Trees preferentially share of resources with their offspring.
Thanks for sharing an amazing story. I'm not surprised to see motherly love in spiders.
It’s SO cool when you have one of these experiences with a wild animal. A tiny little moment of true connection and communication. Thanks for the story.
I keep several tarantulas and a few other spiders, and they are absolutely fascinating! Your description of the spider waving its arms and running from side to side makes me think it was likely a jumping spider. This group of spiders have large eyes and don't build webs to catch prey, and are really cute!
This is a bit more elaborate behaviour than what I have observed from our (small) spiders here, but as a general rule, I don't do anything to spiders in my apartment as well. They keep their territory clean of other insects and do not get into my way, so I like keeping them. Unless the spider is really large, aggressive or poisonous, I do not get why so many people are afraid of them either. Perhaps that the Australian Exception :)
We have an influx of Joro spiders in our area (N/Central GA), and they are absolute nightmare fuel. I can't have them in my porch or where people are going to be; their webs are big and sticky, but I'm having a hard time bringing myself to killing them.
Interestingly the Joro spider is invasive to Georgia now, but their ecological impact is not known. They eat an invasive species of stinkbug however that the native spiders do not eat so they may actually end up having a net positive impact on the environment despite being invasive
Everything I've read says they are not harmful; they can bite, and will if they need to, but will get away if they can.
I've killed a few, but I think I won't any more. Not necessarily because of this article, I just hate killing things.
I never knew of them before this fall until a friend of mine went on "removal" spree at his place, and now I've seen a lot more of them in my own yard.
One issue is we also have migrating hummingbirds, and the webs are big enough to foul them up. The spiders won't eat them of course, but I also can't have our hummingbirds dying over getting caught so I'll be knocking down webs in their area if I have to.
There is a Russian (Eastern European? Slavic?) superstition against kill spiders. You can kill insects all day, but you don’t kill spiders. You just leave them be.
That’s all well and good until you live somewhere with a large population of brown recluse spiders, and a healthy fear of them can keep you from losing a limb.
This particular spider kept running back and forth between my monitor and a window, and when it'd get to my monitor, it would wave its front legs at me. If I moved to the left, it would run across to the left side of the monitor and waves it legs again. If I stood up and moved closer to it, it would run back to the window, turn around, and waves its legs at me. From watching YouTube too much, I was always under the impression that this was either a sign of aggression or a defensive stance.
But after a few times of going back and forth like this, I realized there were approximately 50 baby spiders around a light by the window, which had been closed since the previous day. Normally this would be a nightmare for me (I've always had a fear of spiders), but after a while, I had this crazy notion that the spider was trying to get me to open the window. So I did, and it immediately ran to the babies, wrapped a single strand of silk around the old webbing, and started dragging swaths of the babies' webbing toward the window.
I have no idea if the room was just dry and they needed some humidity, or if the food had been too scarce for too long. Whatever it was, that parent spider was in full blown panic mode, and managed to effectively communicate their problem to a human. I haven't killed any spiders or insects since (aside from a few particularly asshole-ish mosquitos), and actually keep small water dishes in my bathroom for two spiders who've now lived with me for nearly a year. If any babies hatch inside and get close to me, I use my phone's flash to guide them back to a corner with a light on -- they are seemingly always drawn to the brightest light source.
Spiders are incredible creatures, and I deeply regret not realizing that sooner.