The Indigestible

Wow, you can always tell when PZ’s linked your site. Massive spike in hits. Yee!

Thanks, all, for the kind words, par­tic­u­larly about the qual­ity of the images. I’m lucky in that I have a darn good cam­era at my dis­posal, and that I was able to cap­ture images of this spi­der in vivo as opposed to squashed, or insec­ti­cided, or float­ing in formalde­hyde. The light­ing con­di­tions were very good, and I was for­tu­nate in that the spi­der was controlled.

I sus­pect most pic­tures of spi­ders taken by non-​​arachnid experts (I’m not an expert either) are made under con­di­tions of some duress, amid fears the crea­ture will scut­tle off to parts unknown behind the book­case or might jump straight up two feet in the air and LAND ON YOUR FACE AND BITE YOUR NOSE AAAAIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEE. The lid for the can­is­ter was right beside me so I could quickly cap the jar if it looked like my “lee­tle frien’” was start­ing to get frisky; but it just sat there on its perch calmly and let itself be pho­tographed. The qual­ity was good enough — and infor­ma­tion I got online also good enough — that pass­ing it along in a con­cise and clear iden­ti­fi­ca­tion guide was emi­nently possible.

A true brown recluse has, as Coragyps noted, a much more promi­nent “fid­dle”; the desert brown variant’s is much less clear. That was why I was only about 95% cer­tain at first until I located the addi­tional infor­ma­tion I put in the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion PDF.

I’ve kept taran­tu­las before and am some­what famil­iar with spi­ders in gen­eral, and can usu­ally deter­mine pretty quickly if I’m look­ing at a fast-​​moving or aggres­sive spi­der as opposed to a rel­a­tively docile one. Browns seem to be in the lat­ter camp. That said, there’s no way in hell I’d want a brown crawl­ing on me.

It was a lit­tle spooky tak­ing the pic­tures, I don’t mind telling you — and Wednesday night, after I’d cap­tured it ini­tially, I was def­i­nitely suf­fer­ing from a case of the creeps. It wasn’t severe, but it was def­i­nitely there. I put the can­is­ter out­side that night in a kind of super­sti­tious state of mind. There was no way for the spi­der to get out, but I still didn’t want it in my house. Obviously, after a good (?) night’s sleep I was able to han­dle things more calmly.

As for the widow vari­ety, I don’t play games with them. In their webs I think they’d be much harder to trap and con­tain than a roam­ing type of arach­nid, and while I might be tempted to con­sider an attempt at con­tain­ment given a stout pair of gloves, a long stick to break the web and pull the spi­der away and a deep, secure con­tainer with an instantly-​​applicable lid, I think in most cases with a widow — espe­cially in my home — I’d be tempted to make use of the Yellow Pages. One good swing is enough to flat­ten just about anything.

Oh — no, Jeff, wid­ows don’t jump. But they can move pretty fast. Don’t feel bad about using a shovel to deal with it. You really don’t want these spi­ders breed­ing in your home.

Ezekiel — you’re prob­a­bly right that my com­ment re Gila mon­sters was a bit harsh, but do bear in mind how slug­gish those lizards are. Most snakes — even the non-​​venomous ones — pose a sub­stan­tially greater bite risk than a foot-​​long, slow-​​moving quadruped that can­not pos­si­bly shimmy up your leg unnoticed.

Randy — Might or might not have been a female widow. Some vari­eties here seem to resem­ble the Australian Redback in that they have painted-​​looking dor­sal sur­faces; the best ID is always made by look­ing for the red hour­glass on the ven­tral side of the abdomen.

The dor­sal pat­terns are actu­ally quite lovely, as is the spi­der itself with its glossy black body, but def­i­nitely to be admired from afar.

I’d rec­om­mend look­ing for more infor­ma­tion on sev­eral crea­tures you’re likely to encounter in Tucson (which, BTW, was my favorite Arizona city to live in):

1. Widow spi­ders
2. Brown spi­ders
3. Scorpions — par­tic­u­larly bark scorpions
4. Solifuges (“sun spiders”)
5. Paper wasps

The Sonora Desert Museum would make an excel­lent place to begin your search for info. If you haven’t gone there yet, do — it’s a fan­tas­tic and won­der­ful expe­ri­ence, and utterly bereft of YEC non­sense such as that to be found at Ham’s folly. Plan to go there early in the morn­ing (a lot of cre­pus­cu­lar ani­mals are mov­ing around and being active at that time of day) and plan on spend­ing the entire day there.

Jason — Excellent post! Everyone should read this one! I par­tic­u­larly liked your choice of DVD title for size comparison.

ordi­nary­girl — Good point. It might be pru­dent for me to get some traps myself. Thanks for the cau­tion­ary note.

For those who sug­gested killing the spi­der: To be fair the thought did cross my mind. But spi­ders are not like small­pox; they have a niche in the ecosys­tem and fill it extremely well. They’ve been doing so for hun­dreds of mil­lions of years. To assume we can sim­ply erad­i­cate a species because we per­ceive it as being a threat is to be naïve and, frankly, arrogant.

I under­stand the worry that my lit­tle brown’s off­spring might be a dan­ger to oth­ers — but con­sider this will be many spi­der gen­er­a­tions down the line, given where I released it. By then other spi­ders will have done pre­cisely the same thing: repro­duced en masse. One spi­der more or less, liv­ing in the wilder­ness, is essen­tially noth­ing in the grand tapes­try of life.

And killing it just because I had the abil­ity to do so seems, to me, petty.

Several hun­dred years ago there was an ani­mal that most peo­ple believed was a seri­ous threat, so extreme mea­sures were taken to attempt to elim­i­nate it entirely. Populations crashed; the species, while nowhere near extinc­tion, was so sig­nif­i­cantly reduced in num­bers that an unex­pected con­se­quence arose.

The prey this species sought soon surged in num­bers, and the result was a mas­sive rise in pesti­lence that ended the lives of mil­lions of humans in mis­ery and terror.

The species was Felis domes­ti­cus and their prey was the com­mon rat — which hap­pened to carry fleas infested with bubonic plague. Cats were being killed because it was believed that they were agents of Satan. Rats flour­ished and death stalked Europe.

I’m not entirely cer­tain that the desire, today, to elim­i­nate browns, wid­ows or box jel­ly­fish is sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent from the super­sti­tious dread of cats in the Dark Ages — and there is no way to pre­dict how such an elim­i­na­tion may adversely affect the bios­phere we share with all other ani­mals. Besides, if I know that box jel­ly­fish fol­low pat­terns and sea­sons, and I know where they con­gre­gate, and I know that I’d be at risk for being stung in cer­tain waters at cer­tain times of the year, then I’d have to be a fuck­ing moron to want to be in their prox­im­i­tiy when a half day’s trip on land fur­ther along would leave me free of their threat.

Some of us seem to think we have a right to be where we are, because we have tar­mac and prop­erty deeds and elec­tric­ity run­ning into our homes. We seem to think that our tech­nol­ogy gives us man­i­fest des­tiny. But spi­ders, for instance, don’t rec­og­nize bor­ders in the same way as, say, wolves. You can piss a spi­der off, but you can’t piss it away.

We see our houses as our habi­tat; but spi­ders see them as sim­ply another con­ve­nient set of cor­ners for build­ing a web. Spiders exist purely on reflex. I once made a taran­tula strike a pen­cil with its fangs, sim­ply by stroking the tip against the cilia around its che­licerae. It didn’t strike out of a sense of threat; it didn’t strike in a quest for food. It sim­ply struck as a reflex.

Spiders’ brains are nonex­is­tent; spi­ders do not think. They are merely bun­dles of nerves that work in a given fash­ion under given stim­uli. They cer­tainly don’t walk across a pad of con­crete and then “invade” a house out of a preda­tory, mali­cious or ter­ri­to­r­ial nature; they’re sim­ply being, exist­ing, in a space which was not made for them, but which is warm, con­ve­nient and stable.

In most cases, most of the nat­ural world is the same. We are not being invaded by spi­ders. We are, instead, walk­ing into their world and giv­ing them appar­ently safe places to live. We sim­ply don’t have the right to see them as pests.

It’s easy to not get hit by a jel­ly­fish. Just stay out of the water when they’re in sea­son. Stick to fil­tered, chlo­ri­nated swim­ming pools. And if you insist on swim­ming where you know they are, man up enough to face the pos­si­ble con­se­quences. You made the choice. To hate jel­ly­fish for being in the water is like hat­ing jump­ing cholla for being on the land. Just stay clear and stop act­ing like you own the whole god­damned planet; you do not.

And with spi­ders, under­stand that when one is walk­ing across the car­pet, it’s not try­ing to sneak past you like a mis­chie­vous child with a filched cookie. It’s sim­ply tread­ing ground to get to wher­ever it’s going. Catch it and give it a break — set it loose out­side so it can get to where it needs to be.

Sometimes we need to look a lit­tle beyond our own parochial con­cerns in deter­min­ing how we live in — and live with — the world of nature.

Followup to gwenn’s post:

I’ve been cor­re­spond­ing with her by email, and for­tu­nately it looks like she’s not deal­ing with an inva­sion of browns, but rather a slew of spi­ders from a look-​​alike species. I’ll blog a bit more on that, given her per­mis­sion to do so, when time per­mits — but I can say that I’ve seen sim­i­lar spi­ders myself, and won­der if maybe we aren’t look­ing at a kind of mim­icry à la monarch vs. viceroy butterflies.

That is, if you (as an evolv­ing ani­mal) “know” that a par­tic­u­lar spi­der, of a par­tic­u­lar appear­ance, is extremely toxic, you might tend to avoid other crea­tures that share sim­i­lar col­oration and body plans just to be safe.