I’d intended today to post on my Arizona-themed Magic deck (mentioned here), but something happened last night that changed my mind.
Wednesday we hosted a presentation on venomous creatures of northwestern Arizona — the talk was about the A-listers with poison, such as Western diamondback and Mohave rattlesnakes, Gila monsters* and scorpions.
That night (last night), while I was watching MythBusters (a rerun but I hadn’t seen it the first time around), I noticed motion in my peripheral vision.
There was a spider crawling slowly up the wall.
Not at all unusual, actually. My apartment is hardly sealed from the elements — the screens are a little loose, and I regularly keep the door open to let some breeze in at night — so I occasionally get visitors. Whenever possible I like to trap my little guests and put them back outside, where they are quite welcome to dine on roaches, crickets and so on.
I upended the candy dish — actually the container that a Specialized cyclocomputer was sold in — and trapped the spider under it, tipped it into the canister and lidded it. Looking the spider over, though, I realized it wasn’t what I was expecting to see, a small wolf spider. It was definitely a wandering style of spider … but the cephalothorax and abdomen seemed too small in relation to the legs.
Photos after the flip, as well as the rest of the story.
Just to give you a sense of the size of this thing, here it is inside the dish I trapped it in, with a pen nearby for scale.
As you can see, it’s really small. You might surmise too that it’s a good climber — after all, it made it to about chest height on my apartment’s wall before I spotted it. It’s perching here on a plastic notch inside the container, I think because it’s the only thing the spider can really grab onto.
The spider did not go to my office in its uncovered state — I lidded it and kept it lidded when I caught it the night before, particularly after my suspicion grew to something approximating certainty.
While many webless spiders have a similar body plan, I’m familiar with the wolf and huntsman variety (and I’ve kept tarantulas), so I knew I wasn’t looking at any representative of those types. I got my cheesy magnifier out and looked closely at the spider and saw something like what you see in the following photograph. (BTW, all the images here were taken with the Nikon D50 I use at work.)
I’m not sure, but given the structure of the violin shape on the cephalothorax, as well as the faint lines radiating out to the legs, I think the darkening we see here might represent nerve clusters or bundles that centralize near the eyes and chelicerae. If I recall correctly spiders’ blood is generally transparent, so I don’t think this is a mass that represents blood vessels or a heart location. In fact I seem to recall that spiders have their hearts in their abdomens.
With the contrast enhanced slightly, it’s pretty obvious what I have here. I did some poking around online last night and came away with two things:
- About 95% certainty; and
- A pretty substantial case of either the heebies or the jeebies.**
Today I confirmed it. This is an Arizona brown spider — what in other parts of the US is called a brown recluse. It’s possessed of necrotizing venom capable of doing substantial tissue damage; in some cases amputations are required. Deaths have been reported as well. It shares, with the widow/black widow spider, the distinction of being the most poisonous arachnid in the United States.
I brought it to work today to consult our local expert; he concurs with my identification. In addition to the violin shape on the cephalothorax, distinguishing characteristics are long legs, prominent pedipalpi, tan coloration and three pairs of eyes arranged symmetrically around the forepart of the cephalothorax. (Most spiders have eight eyes, often along a centerline on the cephalothorax. The browns and recluses have only six, set in a semicircle. It was the eye count and arrangement that was the clincher for me, since the Arizona browns’ violin shape is quite indistinct under most lighting conditions.)
Brown Spider traits (PDF, 145 KB)
In addition to the identifying traits for this spider, you might take note that this specimen is missing two legs, one from either side of its body. This leads me to think it was, until fairly recently, an outdoor-dweller. While I can’t say for certain that I’ve tracked every instance of wildlife in my home, I’m fairly sure that there’s nothing inside which could take the legs off a brown spider.
Although I’m not particularly delighted to have discovered this type of spider in my home, I’m not going to kill it. At the moment it’s extremely well controlled; it’s in a plastic container with a secure lid that’s been taped in place, so it poses no threat to me or anyone else. This evening I’ll take it out into the desert, a decent distance from people’s homes, and let it go.
I just thought it was a pretty striking convergence — first my post on our wildlife, then the seminar on venomous local animals; now this.
One other thing. The carpet in my apartment is a sculptured hi-lo shag of a mottled sand-and-tan shade that would provide almost perfect camouflage for this spider — and its friends the scorpion and the solifuge. It might be time to consider asking the landlord for it to be swapped out in favor of a less-concealing color and pattern.
====
* These lizards are dangerous to humans if you pick them up, spend about five minutes pissing them off and then stick your finger in their mouths and ask, politely, to be bitten please. They’re slow, sluggish and not even remotely aggressive.
Anyone who has been bitten by a Gila monster probably deserves to die, just for being such a useless idiot to have successfully managed to goad the lizard to bite him in the first place. A safe assumption is that if someone has been bitten by a Gila monster, sobriety was not a factor in the event.
Unfortunately, their bites are pretty much never lethal. Hence the Survival of the Dimwittest, and Bush’s 28% approval rating.
** Or, possibly, both. I’m not afraid of spiders, particularly, but browns and widows do disturb me somewhat. One of the very few times I ever saw the late Steve Irwin get visibly nervous handling an animal was when he was showing a widow spider. Bites from these creatures can be extremely serious.
====
UPDATE: The release was successful. I took it into a remote area and let it go near a decent patch of low brush. It vanished against the ground cover almost instantly.
Most people I spoke to Wednesday believed I should have killed it, but I didn’t see a reason and still don’t. From the moment I’d trapped it in the secure canister its potential for danger to me or anyone else was entirely neutralized.
I learned something, too. Brown recluse spiders are delicate, apparently quite fragile, surprisingly mild-mannered — this spider was not even remotely aggressive — and they’re so small as to be translucent. I suppose that’s why they hide most of the time; they have about the same possibility of constitution and strength as a daddy-longlegs (which, by the way, does not have the most potent venom in the world, despite rumors to the contrary; its venom is barely toxic at all). I suppose the potent venom is mostly to make up for their relatively weak bodies in their natural environment as predators.
I’m much more creeped out by (venomless) solifuges, in fact, than I am by brown recluses. That’s not to say I want brown spiders around or that I don’t have respect for them; but I’m not spooked by the thought of them any more. That twenty-four hours I spent with one in reasonably close interaction turned out to be quite instructive, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to see one alive and set it free — at a good distance, of course, from anyone’s home.
That said, I should note that brown/recluse spider bites are extremely serious. If you think you’ve been bitten by a brown — or a widow — you must get medical help immediately. There’s no reason to panic, since early treatment will stop the worst effects, but the very last thing you want to do is “watch it for a few days and see what happens”.
The necrotic effects of a brown’s toxins are sufficient to kill off a lump of flesh inside your body roughly the size of a tennis ball if the bite goes untreated. Even with a delay of just a day or two, you could extend your recovery time to months or years rather than just days or weeks.
Bite reactions start with a white blister that expands in an angry, red sensitive ring that looks like a bull’s eye, and tend to happen in thinner skin areas like the webbing between fingers, or where the spider has been constricted against your skin by clothing or perhaps in bed.
Other symptoms include feelings of having the flu, stomach cramps and vomiting. If you’ve been bitten and you have any of these symptoms, get to a doctor right away. Don’t make an appointment for next week. It’ll be too late and, depending on where you were bitten, you could be in rehab while you regrow a substantial amount of muscle — or you could lose a limb.
Ask my grandmother sometime, or my boss, both of which women were very lucky to have survived bites with no lasting deleterious effects on their well-being. Or ask my dad’s tough-as-nails firefighter friend who lost a leg when he was bitten behind the knee … and ignored it.
Brown spiders all.
14:39 on May 25th, 2007
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7:45 on May 26th, 2007
Brown Recluse! Cool. I’ve never seen one, but I know they occur in Canada (my home, in case you didn’t get the drift.) I have had ‘pet’ Black Widows a couple of times. Used to feed them other arthropods for amusement. They can take out a hornet, just so you know.
But yeah… Solfugids. I’ve seen 2. (Both, oddly, found in pheromon traps for moth pests, about 4 feet above the ground…) Awesomely creepy Jurassic-looking critters. Shiver up the spine just thinking about them.
And Good on you for releasing him (from the looks of the pedipalps, it’s a male, alright.)
7:50 on May 26th, 2007
You’re a better person than I am — I ran into a black widow a couple of days ago and whacked it with a shovel. It was on a web in the small room where our water softener is, and I couldn’t figure out how to get past it safely. I probably should have tried harder to capture it, but I got creeped out when someone told me they jump really far.
Glad your arachnid tale had a happier ending.
7:57 on May 26th, 2007
Back in the 60’s, soon after Brown Recluses were confirmed (or discovered?) to be venemous, the TA for the biology lab I was taking brought three of them in for us to see. He had caught them that morning near his office, in the basement of Old Main at the University of Arkansas. They had more distinct fiddles than yours, though.
Both people I know that were bitten by recluses got the spider trapped between clothing and skin. One lost a big chunk of leg - the other had no lasting effects after being treated by a physician with a modified “stun gun.” No foolin’.
8:38 on May 26th, 2007
I saw a few of these(1) while growing up on the Wasatch front in Utah. They’re very timid. In fact, the only agressive spiders I’ve ever encountered were all of smooth-skinned hairless yellow variety, whose name I never learned. I’ve been told widows are agressive, but they’ve always seemed timid when I encountered them.
(1) At least, that’s I think I saw - I’m a non-expert.
8:56 on May 26th, 2007
Thank you for this post. PZ linked to it and I’m very happy he did. I’ve hunted quite a bit for a good, clear photo of a brown recluse since they live in our area (Austin, Tx). I do my best to never kill any spider in our house and just take them back out to our garden. But I occasionally get nervous with the very small ones that “may be” a brown recluse. You posted the clearest picture I’ve seen of the markings and gave one of the best descriptions.
I have two family members who have survived bites and got treatment in time to only have minor damage. One friend was bitten in the night on her shoulder and had to be hospitalized as the bite location caused the venom to affect her lungs.
Thank you for the post and fantastic picture.
10:04 on May 26th, 2007
“I’m not afraid of spiders, particularly, but browns and widows do disturb me somewhat. ”
That’s clear. I think you dealt with the situation very rationally and humanely. Great post.
10:23 on May 26th, 2007
Thanks for sharing this encounter. I have a similar policy towards venomous but non-agressive domestic interlopers too. One can be respectful and merciful without being stupid.
I’m helping to raise my 3 year-old nephew, and his parents and I are instilling the same (I hope) sense of wonder and respect about nature in him.
10:30 on May 26th, 2007
I must congratulate you for your sane, calm, rational and entirely correct response. Me, I would have stomped it into its constituent atoms and moved to another continent.
10:49 on May 26th, 2007
Fantastic experience to have had, and well treated as well. The capture, examination and release. It reminds me of the time my mom called me up from her house out in the boonies of Austin TX with a snake she had caught in the front yard. She wanted me to identify it, so I stopped by. She had scooped up the rather small snake in a glass mason jar. It turned out to be a cottonmouth. I delivered the snake to the Austin Herptelogical society.
I have to say, though, I dislike the line “Anyone who has been bitten by a Gila monster probably deserves to die.” Pretty damn harsh. Deserves? Earned, perhaps, but deserves? Man, I think about all the goofy shit I did growing up and the equally minor transgressions I’ve made and others have undoubtedly made and I can’t help but think we all deserve to die for one stupid thing or another. Like my mom with the cottonmouth. She just had no idea she was dealing with a venomous snake. How would she? She’s not a scientist, a naturalist, an outdoor enthusiast, a snake expert, and previous to that day, I don’t think she’d ever seen a poisonous animal outside of a nature show or a zoo. She’s just a 50 year-old woman with a large yard.
10:53 on May 26th, 2007
I just moved to Arizona - Tucson area myself - a couple of months ago. One of my early experiences was being awakened in the middle of the night by feeling something crawling around on my head. I brushed it off, grabbed a flashlight (why yes, I do always keep a flashlight (or two) at hand), checked it out (large, round abdomen was the most striking feature), rolled back over and went to sleep.
At the time, I didn’t think it was a black widow. But having finally seen real black widows in the wild for the first time in my adult life since then (and only a few yards away from where I’d been sleeping, at that), I’m not so sure it wasn’t. Certainly the size was about right for a female.
A bit creepy in the hindsight, then, but at least I certainly wasn’t bitten by it, whatever it was.
13:15 on May 26th, 2007
Some years ago I was bitten on the thumb by one which I never saw, but which was in some discarded cardboard boxes. The “medical help” didn’t know what it was at first–not until a few days later. Then they didn’t do much of anything for it. this was in the 80’s maybe there wasn’t much they knew how to do? I didn’t lose anything luckily. (They said they would have to do surgery and take out the whole area if it got any worse) but it made me very sick and was very painful and I even fainted once! It isn’t something I would want to repeat and I suggest wearing gloves when cleaning trash.
13:31 on May 26th, 2007
One of the things I’m really hoping will fall out of biotech advancements is the ability to either neutralize or completely exterminate small, highly toxic, wildlife. It usually takes a dose of stupidity to get attacked by large predators like lions or monitor lizards. Bad luck is all it takes to get attacked by a box jellyfish or other toxic threat. There’s no reason we should consider the retention of latter any more desirable than the retention of smallpox.
15:42 on May 26th, 2007
“anon May 26th, 2007 at 13:31
One of the things I’m really hoping will fall out of biotech advancements is the ability to either neutralize or completely exterminate small, highly toxic, wildlife. It usually takes a dose of stupidity to get attacked by large predators like lions or monitor lizards. Bad luck is all it takes to get attacked by a box jellyfish or other toxic threat. There’s no reason we should consider the retention of latter any more desirable than the retention of smallpox.”
idiot.
16:24 on May 26th, 2007
“Bad luck is all it takes to get attacked by a box jellyfish or other toxic threat.”
Or poor preparation. Box jellyfish are indeed extremely toxic, none the less they can only penetrate fairly soft skin (unlikely on your hand for example). So a good lycra suit gives a lot of protection.
19:45 on May 26th, 2007
Not just Lycra either - pantyhose stockings work just fine.
And box jellyfish are eaten by turtles
20:08 on May 26th, 2007
Once I was sitting in my office working and a wolf spider kept running across my papers. I was afraid I’d accidentally hurt it, so I kept shooing it away and blowing it off to the side. But it kept coming back.
My graduate assistant noticed this and said; “What is that?” When I pointed out the spider he became very agitated and wanted to kill it. I explained there was no danger and I’d prefer the spider’s company to that of the bugs it ate. My GA went back to his desk, obviously shaken and upset.
But later it occurred to me that there were probably spiders in his hometown in Bangladesh that one should not be so casual about.
23:36 on May 26th, 2007
There’s no reason we should consider the retention of [the] latter [venemous animals] any more desirable than the retention of smallpox.
That’s a rather stupid comparison. How many people did smallpox kill per year, even in supposedly “resistant” populations, and how many people have died of brown recluse bites in all of recorded history?
Stating a desire to exterminate essentially harmless species (they’re harmless even if you meet one but react appropriately, as the above episode demonstrates) is an admission of allowing fear to govern one’s decision. You fear spiders, so you hate them. What else do you fear? I imagine the list is long.
I also came here from PZ’s place; you can expect a “pharyngulanche” of traffic over the next day or two. Thanks for posting this, I found it an interesting and entertaining story.
23:56 on May 26th, 2007
…surely you recognize the difference between an infectious virus that cannot survive outside of a host, serves as food for nothing, and generally does not have a consistent effect of keeping prey populations within sustainable levels, and an animal species that has all these traits and also happens to be poisonous if accidentally bothered?
What SHOULD fall out of biotech, however, are techniques for developing more effective and comprehensive anti-venom compouds with few to no side effects, and synthesizing large quantities of them. In the mean time, it’s perhaps regrettable that natural selection is unlikely to eliminate humans who think nature has no value beyond their convenience…
1:35 on May 27th, 2007
I found this post this morning, via PZ’s Pharyngula. Being a bit of a spider freak myself I decided to blog it from my own site, only to discover as I typed that just to my right was a fairly hefty tangle-web of the kind built by our Aussie favourites, the Redback. Serendipity indeed.
It turned out to be a close relative, rather than Ms. Redback herself, but still, coincidental… Write up to be found on the blog, linked off my name.
8:18 on May 27th, 2007
We had a brown recluse infestation in our home many years ago. It’s fairly common in Missouri from what I read. We still have a ritual for shaking out the sheets before getting into bed and all of our clothes before we put them on.
If you saw one in your house it’s likely there are more. We only saw one climbing the wall, but after we put in spider traps (sticky traps) we captured 20 or more in a month. It was enough to give us the heebie jeebies, but neither of us were ever bitten.
17:23 on May 27th, 2007
while the particular spider you captured and released will likely harm no one, one cannot say the same about its future progeny, if any. I recommend going back into the desert, finding this guy, and taking the little f-er out.
23:28 on May 27th, 2007
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):
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 naive 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.
8:49 on May 29th, 2007
I got bit by one of these little guys in my house in Missouri last year on the back of my thigh. Didn’t notice it and went in to the doc’s the next day. By that time it was fairly apparent what had bitten me, but they’re still not doing anything in particular for the bites, at least here in MO. We watched it, and I got some pain meds, but nothing more. I suppose if it had gotten more serious, they would have done more for me. I ended up sacrificing a goodly sized chunk of flesh, but it didn’t go deep and basically just was nasty and hurt a lot.
Very cool story, and great pics.
14:43 on June 28th, 2007
[...] At this rate it could become a habit. [...]
12:21 on June 30th, 2007
Hallo again, Warren,
I’d have preferred to put this in email, but am not clever enough to find your address. So I put it here, though you might never see it.
Your call was absolutely right; six eyes arranged in a U-shaped formation of three dyads is diagnostic for the Sicariidae, of which the brown recluse is one.
I once found, in Spain, a male Loxosceles rufescens some three inches from my big toe. Far from menacing me, he was cowering. Rightly so, as I soon had him in a phial of alcohol; and have him still.
The go-to guy for everything having to do with recluses is Jamel Sandidge. He observed that it is difficult to make recluses bite (you pretty much have to squeeze their heads). Fascinatingly, he also observed (in a report in Nature, published while he was still working on his doctorate) that the brown recluse L. reclusa is — highly unusually, for a spider — primarily a scavenger.
12:43 on June 30th, 2007
Oh yeah; yours is a male, too.
Missing legs are pretty common, BTW. Spiders shuck off their legs like lizards their tails, when predators grab on.
12:23 on July 2nd, 2007
The address is there, actually, on each of my blog’s pages; it’s just not immediately self-apparent.
Didn’t know browns were scavengers, but in a way it makes sense; after all they really are not very robust, and they don’t live in webs.
It’s not particularly surprising to learn they don’t easily deliver bites through human skin — the one I found was clearly far too small to have large fangs. Still, I’d treat them with quite a lot of respect…
15:13 on August 19th, 2007
Help, I have been battling a what seems like a losing battle with these browns. I am certain this is what I’m dealing with as i have sent several specimens to the Nevada Dept. of Agriculture for identification. I have seen on average one per day in or outside on my house. I have recorded one coming out at sunset each night by the eaves on the house. This has been the worst summer,, I have never seen so amany in my house. Last week, one in my bed, yesterday one on the wall, just now I got one outside on the wall of my house. I have a bad feeling they are nesting in my house. I have had several rounds of power spraying in and on the outside of the house, to no avail, I am still seeing alot. I believe they are nesting in the eaves of the house. does anyone know how to get rid of this type of infestation? I’m desperate! Gwenn in Las Vegas.
14:43 on August 20th, 2007
Sounds like you’ve got a serious problem there. I’d suggest, if you can, getting digital photos of the spiders wherever and whenever you find them, as well as (possibly) marking their locations on a floor plan of your house.
Also, try to get shots of the neighborhood. There’s been a lot of construction in LV over the last decade or so, so make special note if you’re living right alongside open desert; or if many houses in your area are uninhabited; or if the neighbors are letting cars rust out in a weed-choked yard.
The idea here is to both try to track where the spiders are living in your home now; and where they may be coming from.
Then get in touch with either the NV Dept of Ag, or someone on the UNLV campus, about how to deal with these guys, since it seems your pest-control people are failing at the job. Spiders, unless they take a direct hit from it, are generally unaffected by insecticide, and the retiring, shy/hiding behavior of browns will probably make it even harder to control them.
If you haven’t done it, consider tenting and fumigating the house completely, as would be done for termites. I’m unsure what power-spraying is, but given how hardy spiders are in the face of insect treatments, I don’t think it’s the right approach. This is something your pest control company should have told you before they did it.
17:48 on September 21st, 2007
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 a 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.