A "couple of thousand" spiders could be in a house at any one time.

Luis Villazon, a zoologist, said the big figure is if people include baby spiders.

He said: "A 2016 study of 50 houses in North Carolina, US, found cobweb spiders in 65 per cent of all rooms sampled, but this was looking at biodiversity and didn't count the number of individual spiders.

"To add some research of my own, I've just hoovered my entire house - a rare event - and only found 26 spiders.

"But that's just the parts of the house that we can easily scrutinise.

"If you consider under the floorboards, behind the fridge, the loft, the garage and so on, there could easily be that many more still hiding.

"Spiders lay anything from 10-250 eggs at a time, and house spiders may lay as many as five clutches per year."

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