There’s apparently a lot of people in Canada who claim to have been bitten by brown recluse spiders, even though these spiders have never actually been found in Canada.Ī big problem with spider bite diagnoses is that, mostly, they are made on the basis of “I have this injury that looks like a bite, and there are spiders in my bedroom”. There is a nice article by a couple of Canadian entomologists explaining how people all over the world are convinced that necrotic lesions come from spider bites, even though the vast majority of the time they are caused by things like bacterial skin infections. There is even a whole song-and-dance about how spider bites turn into these massive, necrotic lesions, where the skin in the middle dies and sloughs away, and they never heal, and you lose body parts, and all that jazz.įrom what I’ve read, one shouldn’t be too quick to blame these lesions on spider bites, unless you actually see the spider biting you (or feel the bite and actually see the associated spider or its corpse shortly afterwards). Somebody sees a spider and the first thing they think is, “Is it poisonous?” And every largeish, brown spider is a “Brown Recluse”, and is going to bite you. This whole thing about spider bites is almost completely out of hand. Then they squash the poor guy, whose only crime is looking for love in the wrong place. Which brings me to a point: this little spider fella is exactly the sort of thing that people see running around the house, and they immediately freak out, because they’ve been told over and over again that spider bites are dangerous. Granted, the site with this ID key is in Kentucky, where Brown Recluse spiders do live, so for them it would be a possible ID, but I think they are being needlessly alarmist. OK, now, right away I know this is wrong, because (a) my specimen doesn’t really look like the pictures, and (b) the Brown Recluse and its relatives don’t live this far north in any case (as can be seen from the range map on the Bug Guide page). That is the genus the infamous Brown Recluse belongs to. The thing is, I went through their questions, and it came back with the claim that I had something in the genus Loxosceles. In the course of trying to identify it, I found a page at Transylvania University,, which had a little menu-driven system that claimed to identify your spider. We’ve got it down to the family, anyway, which is something. So, I’m not going to get much of an ID on this one, from the looks of things. More to the point, it is not characteristic of wolf spiders (family Lycosidae), which have two enlarged eyes that are pretty distinctive. Again, this is characteristic of funnel-web-weavers. I tried to get a picture of his eyes, with not too much success, but it looks like there are two parallel rows of four eyes each, all pretty equally sized and none all that large. Of course, if you have 8, losing two or three is probably not a big deal. They must lose them at the drop of a hat. So far, I think every spider I’ve posted pictures of has been missing a leg. This one was wandering, and is therefore probably male.Īfter a bit, he unscrunched his legs some so that his body was a bit more visible, but this didn’t help much – he’s nearly black, with not much in the way of distinctive patterning: For most of these spiders, the females build characteristic funnel-shaped webs, which they rarely leave, while the males spend a lot of their time wandering around looking for love. Prominent spinneretes like this are a feature of funnel-web-weaver spiders, family Agelenidae. “Hey, wait”, I hear you cry, “what makes you think this is a male, anyway?” Well, if you look at the end of his abdomen, you can see some pretty prominent projections, these are the spinneretes. This fellow was scurrying across the floor, and once I caught him, he kind of scrunched up with his legs pulled in: Kitchen linoleum is a great place to find spiders – they stand out so well, particularly on light-colored floors, and usually they are far enough away from cover that catching them is a snap. Note: this is a North American funnel-web spider (and is harmless), not an Australian funnel-web spider (which are dangerously venomous).
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