Another fair warning to arachnophobes: You might not want to read the following. As mentioned above I’m kind of into spiders, and living in the tropics gives me a lot more opportunity to contemplate them than some people would prefer.
Hell, yeah. One of those things bit a friend of mine a few years ago; best guess was that it crawled up under the covers towards the foot of his bed. He spent something like 3 days in Intensive Care, pissed blood for about a week, and didn’t walk right for over a year. I mean, his freakin’ foot nearly rotted off.
Be glad it isn’t the brown recluse that particularly favours the underside of toilet seats.
The brown recluse has really taken hold in this part of the Bahamas. I’ve only seen 3 personally in the 8 years I’ve been here, but that was 3 too many. Granted, it’s axiomatic that the ones you don’t see are the real problem …
The one that tried to stake a claim in my underwear drawer was easy enough to deal with.
Ditto the apparently suicidal one that came trucking across the floor of the mess hall during dinner one night, directly to the feet of the one person in the room who was likely to even bother identifying a spider before squashing it. Namely, uh, me. This specimen was a good 15mm long, at a guess; really big, for a brown recluse, and I wouln’t have believed it myself if it hadn’t been for the distinctive markings and morphology. (I even entertained, briefly, the thought that it might be a Chilean recluse–those buggers get up to about 25mm long–but that didn’t seem too plausible geographically.) This one looked pretty old, and had lost half of two legs to something apparently bigger and meaner (a bigger spider, a scorpion, or maybe a rat). If I were a little more inclined towards anthropomorphism, I’d say it wanted to die.
For my money, though, the real prize-winner was one little fucker that made up in timing what it lacked in size. It showed up on my shower curtain one morning. Specifically, on the inside of my shower curtain. I didn’t even see the bastard until I had the shower running and the curtain closed. Too bad we don’t have video footage of the ensuing 30 seconds, because there are TV shows that would pay well for it. I did some serious nude levitation while drowning him in Selsun Blue.
IANAL, but if this is literally the case it sounds like a very nasty Personal Injury suit just waiting to happen.
Before moving here in the early '90s, I spent almost a year in the Seattle area. During that time, there was an intermittent local media flap about something called the “hobo spider” (Tegenaria agrestis, for anyone who gives a shit.) This is a Mediterranean import, considerably larger on average than the brown recluse and a nasty piece of work in its own right. I only know of one outright fatality from it, but there may have been more.
The Times/PI, in their wisdom, made lots of noise about hobo spiders, but AFAIK they never saw fit to print a decent desription. I had a couple of these in my apartment, which I eventually evicted after they repeatedly displayed an inordinate fondness for the insides of my shoes. I didn’t even find out what I’d been hosting until well after the fact.
That was a warm fuzzy feeling, let me tell you.
Very similar to the sensation one might experience upon losing sphincter control.
