The Survival of the Spider

I have a theory with spiders that they can breathe in water, or at least hold their breath for a long time. I am not a big wuss when it comes to spiders, at least, not with small ones. Obviously, if there was a huge hairy tarantula type thing in the room, I may not be so cool, but I can handle the smaller ones. Saying that, there was a medium sized one in the bath the other night, languishing on the far side of the plughole and failing consistently to climb more tan two to three inches up the side before sliding down. Poor thing must have been exhausted. It had very thick black legs and I decided I was not too fond of it. I have seen two similar sized spiders in the region of late, and my new theory makes me think it is actually the same one. Both got accidentally drowned, by taking refuge in my face cloth and getting caught up and dumped in the washbasin with it. They then ended up down the plughole. However, not wanting this new one in my face cloth, I asked Ratboy to remove it, as it was a bit bigger then I felt comfy handling, and it meant being at full stretch across the bath to reach it. Needless to say it was still there when I went to have a shower the next morning. Ratboy, who was off from work, was dead to the world, so I decided that it would be OK to shower with it as it was still on the far side of the plughole, but hopefully able to keep out of the way of the water so it didn’t drown. However, spider had other ideas (especially when the foam from the shower gel got caught up round the plughole) and decided to go slightly up the side of the bath and head towards me. I did not want to tread on the spider and I did not want it crawling on me (OK, so maybe I am a wuss), so I then tried to wash my hair whilst looking down, so shampoo was getting in my eyes, but I noticed the spider had walked onto the rubber bathmat and was not moving. When I had rinsed my hair (and eyes) I decided it must be dead as it was half stuck in one of the holes. I shook out the mat (so the spider was laying in the bath looking quite dead), put the mat over the side of the bath and left the spider for Ratboy to deal with. About 45 minutes later I came back into the bathroom to clean my teeth, to find said spider running around the plug hole again. Do they never learn??!! Pleased that I hadn’t drowned it, I still left it there, but it made me think about how well they survive in water. When Ratboy came in later he threw it out of the window.