I turned on the radio in the middle of a show featuring a young-sounding spider expert who was encouraging people to love spiders. When you find a spider in your home, just leave it alone, he opined. Why? the host pressed. Spiders are fun to watch, are useful creatures, and most of them are harmless.

I hope this gentleman is loved by a spider-fancier, or at least someone very spider-tolerant. I do not think most people would find these reasons persuasive, other than Southerners.

In the South we keep spiders in the house, or at least my clan did. It was bad luck to kill a spider, indoors or out. Unlike our scientific friend, we knew why: spiders eat bugs. Or for those of you who think spiders are bugs, I should say, spiders eat insects. In the South, we have insects aplenty, indoors and out. A friendly spider hidden in a corner is much preferable to a passel of flies or mosquitoes, not to mention the daily-in-summer wasp incursion.

One spider eats about 2000 insects per year. The mass of insects eaten by all spiders each year is greater than the mass of Earth’s human population. If that doesn’t impress you, try to estimate how many insects your mass represents. Thereafter, try not to imagine yourself as a seething mass of insects, a la the Oogie Boogie man.

Here on California’s Central Coast we have spiders too, and by lifelong habit I can rarely bring myself to kill one, so I often escort them outdoors. There hardly any insects here. I have no idea how the outdoor spiders survive–are they just doing a great job? I have seen zero mosquitoes since we moved here twenty months ago, and maybe ten flies. We do have bees, but they stick close to the flowers.

I don’t remember any indoor spider birth events from my childhood, though I may have repressed the memory. Spider guy said that spider egg sacs hold “hundreds or thousands” of tiny babies, who disperse as rapidly as possible when the sacs burst, since mom is usually a cannibal.

That’s one approach to getting your kids to move out.