What Should You Do If You Find a Spider in Your House?

For starters, don't panic—and remember that most of the 40,000 known spider species are not venomous.

When a reader from Belgium found a spider in her bananas, she bravely trapped it—and says she took it to the police for identification (though sadly not in four pairs of tiny handcuffs).

In retrospect, she asked us: "What should I do if I have a [venomous] spider in the house?" (See "7 Bug and Spider Myths Squashed.")

For Weird Animal Question of the Week, we asked spider experts Christopher Buddle of Canada's McGill University and Jo-Anne Sewlal of the University of the West Indies how to react when someone screams "SPIDER!"

Chances are, it's not venomous: Few of the 40,000 known spider species can harm humans, Sewlal says by email. But it's wise to treat a spider as

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