Most people do
not go on safari hoping to see spiders and other “creepy-crawlies”. In fact, most people won’t give spiders a
second thought until they find one in their shower or under their bed. Unfortunately, unless you live in a sterile,
sealed box, you will most likely have spiders around you almost all the
time. Many of them are tiny and you
probably won’t notice 95% of them, but every once in a while you see one that
makes your skin crawl (especially those big nasty hairy ones). At this point you’ve got a few options
(depending on how paralyzed with fear you are). You can: (A) freeze and scream, waiting for
someone more capable to deal with it; (B) kill it; or (C) get closer, identify
it, and admire it for its inherent beauty.
Option “C” is probably NOT the first thing you’d think of doing, but once
you realize that spiders are not “out to get you”, you can learn to relax
around them.
As with snakes, the
fear of spiders is often the fear of the unknown. However, as with snakes, most spiders are
completely harmless, and indeed beneficial to all of us. If all the spiders on the earth were to just
magically disappear, we would all be drowning in a sea of insects! And in Kenya, there are hardly ANY dangerous spiders
that you will ever have to worry about. Bites from dangerous spiders are VERY uncommon, and serious effects from those bites are even less likely.
This blog/guide is not meant to be an exhaustive photographic list of all the spiders in Kenya
(there are literally thousands of them), but rather a simple guide to
representatives of the most common families that one is likely to encounter while
on safari (or in some suburbs of Nairobi).
See subsequent posts for more details/photos.
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