Edit: Thanks for the responses. I’ve learned a few things: 1) Spiders are not super bright and are just looking for a warm place to throw up a web. 2) There are many little critters in the walls of my house that I refuse to believe exist. 3) I suck at grammar and if you don’t see my mistake, then you also suck at grammar.
In: 48
Because they don’t know that they are indoors. Being at home is a human construct and spiders don’t have the capacity to know what that means.
Inside is a better place to web than outside. Especially if that equals food in the long run.
Spiders outside are doing just fine while spiders who live with you have it better. As you only see the ones in your home, you think they are the winners.
Also, most house spiders would die if you put them outside. Their ancestors learnt early on in human history to hang out with humans/in human structures. They’re areas with a predictable climate (temperature and humidity wise), few predators and a relatively decent source of food (all the gnats and flies hanging around food scraps that everyone else is mentioning). So with a comfortable habitat like this, they stopped passing down traits that would make them more suited to living in the harsh outdoors.
And these spiders have hung out around humans long enough and been isolated from the population of outdoor spiders that some scientists think they’re genetically distinct enough to be separate species at this point.
If the spiders are getting in, then rest assured that bugs are getting in too, especially ones smaller than the spider (because they would fit through the entrances even more easily). If you allow a spider to take up residence inside, you will notice that it will live for quite a long time. It is probably eating a lot of bugs that are unobserved by you.
Most bugs are more like small robots than what we’d consider smart beings. Their brains are simple and respond predictably to certain things.
Spiders want a place that has access to water, a certain temperature, and some kind of structure they can use to build a web. They don’t have the capacity to do research and figure out how many bugs are in the area. They find a spot that their robot brain says looks good and build a web there.
Some of them get lucky. One spider built a web near my trash can once and caught a lot of gnats and flies. Others aren’t so lucky. That’s why one spider lays hundreds of eggs. They don’t survive by being smart. They survive by having so many babies the odds favor at least a few of them being able to lay eggs of their own.
There’s more food indoors than you think. Part of why you may not see many bugs inside is there are probably spiders inside your walls taking care of the ones you can’t see.
But overall they don’t live a life like humans do. We try to live as long as possible because we have the capacity to understand and enjoy more than just survival. A lot of animals (insects and arachnids included) are only “designed” to live long enough to breed and, if they don’t succeed, they die shortly after.
You’re over estimating a spiders ability to think.
Insects don’t have super complex problem solving brains.
That spider walked around until it found a suitable location to build a web, which houses have a lot of.
It didn’t do a higher investigation of how many bugs are in that area, because they don’t have brains like we do.
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