Last year I got somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 spider bites across two seperate occasions. The first time I was bit three times on the hand, a few weeks later I got about a dozen bites on my back. Since I’m still here to type this, it wasn’t a deadly posionous spider anyway… I’m sort of worried that they’ll come back this year, though (I got all those bites in July) so I’d like to know if anyone has any idea what they are.
I spent hours looking at pictures of spiders and spider-bites last summer, and got nowhere. Luckily I wrote a description of the little beasts last summer when the biting incidents were still fresh in my mind. This is what I can tell you about the spiders:
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They have to be able to survive in the climate in the extreme northeast, since I live in New Hampshire.
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They are not house spiders, garden spiders or Carolina Wolf spiders. We have lots of those, and I know what they all look like, and these spiders resembled them not at all. They’re very clearly not Northern Widows, fortunately, since those things are really scary. (I’ve only see one ever, thank god).
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They bite easily. (does that make them agressive or just easily startled?) The three bites I was aware of happened all within a span of less than a minute as the spider in question ran across my hand and wrist. The other dozen bites happened while I was sleeping, but since they infested my bedroom it’s pretty safe to assume that they were the biters in that case as well.
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They are very small. The one I caught and killed to get a good look at was only about 3/4th of a cenn- including legs- and others I saw were about that size as well.
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They are a solid brownish-tan color, with no stripes, and no “hairy-ness” that you associate with some spiders like the wolf spiders.
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They have webs. It didn’t seem to be a very “neat” web, but they definitely had created one behind the couch. No symetry to the web, nor a decerniable pattern as I recall.
And that’s about all I can tell you about the spiders themselves. But I know that symptoms of what happened when you were bitten are clues too so:
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The bites didn’t itch. They were pink (a given since I have very fair skin, though), small (like the size of a pencil eraser) and didn’t seem very raised. Mostly the bites on my hand were just a little sore. When I got bit a lot it was a different story, though.
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When I was bitten a dozen or so times on my back, the bites caused the entire area to ache. Starting with the biggest bite mark on my back (it was the size of my own thumbprints and therefore much larger than the other bites which were as small as the ones I’d gotten on my hand earlier. Perhaps it wasn’t a bite but many close together? then there were a lot more than a dozen bites were that the case) and radiating to both hips it hurt a lot. That deep achiness you associate with muscle strain from doing a repeative motion far too many times. It ached that way for about three days before it went away. It took a day to figure out that the bites were there, and most likely responsible for the achiness, so I don’t know if they were raised at all to begin with, since they weren’t by the time I noticed them. I guess I should look at my back everyday
Any prods in the right direction to help narrow down what type of spiders these were would be most appriciated!