Spiders, stink bugs and other creepy-crawlies

ANOTHER LIFE:AT LEISURE in the loo, a rather damp and chilly annex adapted from the old cottage porch, I take a generally benevolent inventory of the resident wildlife: small spiders in their webs around the window, woodlice patrolling the panelling, the odd baby slug grazing algae around the sink, even the occasional dearg a dhaol stalking woodlice in the shower.

Occasional pounces with a wisp of tissue keep the population under control, unless it's a big Tegenaria, whereupon removal may be delegated. There are people to whom this large house spider, so attentively poised, is almost a domestic pet. In its presence, however, I am seized with steely calm, prior to robotic action – or retreat. Even the echo of its form in the curly darkness of a tomato calyx, discarded on the kitchen bench, can prompt unease.

Most such phobias, it seems, are fixed in children by the age of 10, often in response to the protective alarm of women. At nine, a bit pallid, and temporarily billeted on an open-air school in the healthy hills of Surrey, I was caught up in an early-morning flurry of nuns, who, discovering an outsize Tegenaria in a gleaming white washbasin of our cloakroom, swished back and forth in an agitated rustle of serge. They poured whisky on the animal, with what effect I do not remember – but such recollection seems highly suggestive.

Spiders, snakes, scorpions are classic phobic objects in developed cultures across the world, often, it is supposed, as unresolved remnants of evolutionary caution in primitive human societies. Yet the tribespeople of New Guinea or the Amazon have no such irrationality, just killing and often eating the creatures they know might do them harm. One urbanised generation out of the forest, however, and it is a job to coax them back, even as foresters.

Biophilia, a term coined by the great Edward O Wilson ( The Diversity of Life) to describe what he believes is our innate affinity for the natural world, has its negative in biophobia, often expressed in a generalised distaste for invertebrate life.

In The Biophilia Hypothesis(1993), produced with Wilson, Prof Stephen Kellert of Yale put forward a whole set of reasons for human dislike and fear of arthropods – the "creepy-crawlies" with jointed limbs that include insects, spiders and crustaceans.

Many people, he suggests, dislike the wholly different lifestyle of invertebrates. The extraordinary multiplicity of their world can seem to threaten the human sense of selfhood and individuality. Their shapes can appear monstrous, and their behaviour disturbingly mindless and unfeeling.

Many people, Kellert believes, can also feel challenged “by the radical ‘autonomy’ of invertebrates from human will and control”.

Familiarity can help. Years ago we had a cricket in the wardrobe, betrayed by its chirruping at bedtime. (The male can sing for hours.) Never having seen one, and consulting pictures, I found its tensed-up, grasshoppery regard a shade too alien for comfort. Ethna, however, started life in rural Cavan, where a cricket hidden somewhere in the hearth (and eating crumbs) was part of the luck in a house. She worried only that it might chew my socks.

Central heating and the vacuum cleaner have virtually extinguished an insect that may have arrived in these islands with returning medieval crusaders. In his Irish Indoor Insects (2000) Dr Jim O'Connor of the National Museum of Ireland's natural-history branch noted the lack of any certain record of the cricket for 30 years, until a female jumped out of a Castleknock fireplace in 1991. "If you are lucky enough to have them in your home," he wrote, "do treasure them."

Looking this up, my eye was caught by a page heading: “Stink Bugs”. Just at the moment the eastern United States is suffering a population explosion of an alien stink bug from Asia, fattening up in peach and apple orchards before seeking hibernation in people’s houses. While by no means the menace of bedbugs, which are over-running even the poshest bits of eastern US cities, the defensive odour of massed marmorated stink bugs when stepped on or annoyed is, apparently, quite skunkily offensive.

Ireland’s shield bugs (from their shape) are not only potential stink bugs, releasing a chemical secretion from glands on their underside when alarmed – “a horrible smell,” confirms O’Connor – but can also give a nasty bite “when roughly handled”.

The large green-and-red hawthorn shield bug (1.5cm) is the most familiar in parks and gardens, and there’s another brown sap-feeder, the forest shield bug, that sometimes comes indoors with fruit.

As native insects, their numbers are partly controlled by co-evolved parasitic wasps – as so often, the gardener’s unnoticed best friends.

Eye on nature

While queuing for the ferry at Dún Laoghaire we saw starlings picking squashed insects off the fronts of cars. It reminded us of the little birds that clean the teeth of crocodiles.

Myles and Rose Dolan (11 and seven), London

In Co Wicklow we saw a long, low animal with short legs, a pert face and smooth brownish fur. His body, which was about the circumference of a cucumber and seven or eight inches long, was the same width from back to front.

Ethel Kelly, Hainault Road, Dublin 18

It was a stoat.

Not for the first time the swallows in our shed have reared a third brood at the end of September. Do these late arrivals stand much chance of getting to Africa?

Craig Bullock, Croghan, Co Roscommon

That is very late for a brood, and, unless autumn is warm and insects plentiful, they are unlikely to have a successful migration.

We found an octopus or squid-like creature in shallow water in Co Mayo. It was about the size of a small shrimp.

Conor and Cliona McLaughlin (both six), Salthill, Galway

It was a bobtail squid, also called a little cuttlefish, Sepiola atlantica.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address