if you answered yes, or if you're just curious about your eight-legged animal neighbors, i have the perfect gem of a youtube channel for you.
"the spiders in your house" by travis mcenery is a channel dedicated to educating people on house spiders. it provides well-researched information from professional arachnologists, presented with a dry sense of humor by a amateur spider-watcher who really loves and cares about these wonderful, misunderstood, marginalized animals.
there is no stigmatization of spiders. there's no scary music. there's no sensationalist, biased rhetoric of "this nightmare of a spider is the deadliest animal on earth!"
there is just empathy and education and good humor.
he debunks common myths about these ubiquitous and beneficial animals, he explains what makes each species unique, and why they do the things you see them do. he even gives tips for living with these critters, and rates how polite of a neighbor you can expect a given species to be
the channel is new, and only has three videos so far, but as a longtime appreciator of arachnids, i can say that this is some quality spider education.
his video on the much-maligned (but mostly harmless) yellow sac spider is probably his best video yet, though it is a bit long, so if you want something shorter, you can watch his videos on the common house spider or the cellar spider
knowledge is the biggest factor in reducing arachnophobia. the more people know about spiders, the less scared they get of them. there are countless people (myself included) who went from being afraid of spiders to being fascinated by them, because they took the time to learn about these animals.
