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.

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.

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…

Missing legs are pretty common, BTW. Spiders shuck off their legs like lizards their tails, when predators grab on.

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.

Very cool story, and great pics.

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 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.