arachnologus am I right in guessing from your username that you are an entomologist? If so, maybe you could answer this question: have there been any studies done indicating the frequency of spider bites to humans? I ask because a lot of people I know seem to blame every little unusual blemish they discover on their skin on spider bites and I am somewhat skeptical, as I have only been bitten once (and it was my fault, as I was harassing a mother wolf spider and her brood).
ETA: my father is a (retired) entomologist, but he spent the last 40 or so years working on gypsy moths and spruce bud worms…
I’m no entemologist, but I did once attend an emergency medical conference where the state’s poisionous animal expert spoke about the occurance of “spider bites”. We often see patients in the ER that have some type of abscess and attribute it to a mysterious spider bite, of course for which the offending spider is never seen or smashed or identified in any way. Her take was that very few of the bites were real bites, for many of the reasons stated here (spiders don’t bite unprovoked, ect.) and she showed a long slideshow of supposed spider bites alongside true, confirmed spider bites and there were some obvious differences that showed most of the supposed bites to be something else.
I have a hard time people are being bitten without ever getting to see the spider as well. I can usually feel something a small as a single string tickling me inside my shirt or a average sized mosquito landing on me, so I can’t imagine that spiders can secretly climb up someone without them noticing, much less biting them without being detected and it seems farfetched to think that these spiders are lying in wait in their beds for some time when they are in a deep sleep to pounce…
Hmmm. House full of spiders vs. poisonous fog. House full of spiders… poisonous fog.
The only solution there is to move.
Spiders are fine outside or in the corners of the basement, but if I see them inside they’re gonna get squashed. (Luckily so far I have never seen a single spider inside any of my apartments in the 7 years I’ve been living in Manhattan.)
Well no, real wolf spiders are not true house spiders (can’t complete life cycle indoors because their prey foraging technique wouldn’t be viable). However, practically everybody who comes to me saying they have wolf spiders indoors really has giant house spiders which have a similar body form and running speed, but do not have the specific arrangement of eyes that determines whether a spider is in the wolf spider family. See my page on this phenomenon. There have been cases of real wolf spiders turning up indoors (they’re among the 5% of indoor spiders that really did “wander in”) but most of what you’re seeing is probably just house spiders that look wolf-like as long as you don’t examine them too closely.
Your guess is not quite right. Unlike your dad the entomologist, I do not primarily study insects, but rather arachnids. I’m an arachnologist.
In answer to your question, it’s really hard to get hard data on frequency of real spider bites because such a large proportion of the reported spider bites are phoney. We’ll probably never have population-wide figures until the standards of “bite” reporting improve markedly. All I can do is tell you what I’ve personally observed, that most people who think they’re bitten by spiders (or, if they’re more enlightened, don’t even think so) have never seen even a single spider bite them. I personally, after handling tens of thousands of live spiders over a 35-year period have received 2 genuine bites (both trivial in effect). I have to assume the average person gets no more than 1 or 2 real ones in a lifetime, and the chances of one of those being serious are very low indeed. Of course, a few people are always above average and there are valid cases of individuals who have received several real bites, up to perhaps 10 or 12, at widely separated intervals.
But people who think they’ve been bitten by spiders a number of times over a short period are always wrong. Spiders just don’t work that way. These folks are thinking that spiders visit sleeping humans like bedbugs. Ridiculous! (Of course, I’m not counting single events where a spider trapped under a garment bit multiple times within a few seconds. I mean where someone thinks they’ve been bitten several times in a month or two – there have even been those who thought they were bitten every night!)
That’s really interesting. I figured they were wolf spiders because of one I saw outside, then picked out of a photo line-up at the nature center. The ones inside seemed to look like that outside one. Makes sense about their hunting (shudder) technique wouldn’t work inside, but, our house is really old, buggy, and not at all air-tight. We have a couple places around doorframes where you can see right outside. Could a house as run-down as ours be indistinguishable from the outside? Is it the prey selection outdoors that they prefer, or the environment? Maybe they run better on grass than on carpet?
I don’t think I’m ready yet to look my house guests in the eye(s) to figure out what they are. I’m interested, though, on your page where it says that wolf spiders are relatively small. The wolf-like spiders in my house are pretty freakin’ big.
They are not house spiders. But if they really are wolf spiders …
If, after a few weeks of problems with wolf spiders in the house, you then put out hedge apples, it is highly likely that you will not have any more wolf spiders for ages. Probably for almost a year. Stop reading now if you want to believe in hedge apples.
All the wolf spiders that I have coming into the house are males wandering looking for females in breeding season. You can tell because they will have engorged pedipalps (little boxing gloves on the shortened front ‘legs’.) Given mating is very seasonal, it is likely that by the time you have seen a few, and then put out hedge apples, you won’t see any more. If you dance naked on the front lawn, you also probably won’t see any more. Until next year.
I love my wolf spiders. They are almost as photogenic as jumping spiders, but much better to watch if you have burrowing species. You can get to know an individual female right through her life and breeding because she will always be at her burrow. And - as in the case of my favourite wolf spider ever - you might even end up crying over her empty burrow when it is ripped apart by birds.
The main factor about the hunting technique is that it’s visual and requires sunshine. There are nocturnal wolf spiders but they are mainly in the tropics and subtropics. Most hunt only in daylight - which is rather in short supply inside a building. Also, becuase they run around looking for prey instead of waiting for it to come to them (I’m talking about North American wolf spiders here, few of which burrow like Lynne’s Australian ones) they have a relatively high metabolism and probably need to catch prey every day instead of being able to get by on 1-2 a week. Also they need a good water supply, likewise hard to find indoors.
As for wolf spider size: in northern North America, the vast majority of wolf spiders are small. As you get farther south, you get more big ones. But even in one of the gulf states, where you could have 8 or 10 big species you’d still have up to 50 small species, and the small species have bigger populations too.
That gives a very different picture, arachnologus. Thank you. My burrowers, (Lycosa godeffroyi), are very large spiders and hunt by night. If there is any sun, they sunbake at the entrances to their burrows. They also rotate their egg sacs in the sun with their hind legs. Then get heaps of babies on their backs which they carry around. I like having large burrowers, because you can really get to know an individual.
We do have some smaller wanderers as well, but I don’t know if they hunt by day or night. We’re in the sub-tropics/temperate zone down in Melbourne.
The need for water is also interesting. In our really bad drought, and really hot summer days over the last few years, I have been watering my wolf spiders. (Telling people that has me instantly labeled a total nutter.) But one spray of water on their burrows, and they come up to drink it.
:mad:I kept thinking, “Oh,it’s bad luck to kill spiders!” So I let the spiders weave their little webs… that’s how I got bitten in the first place!! That’s why I started this thread!!!
Well, anyway, my arm’s much better now. So either it wasn’t a brown recluse spider, or it got better on its own. I did keep the spider, but it was so squashed that really, who knows what it actually was. Anyway, I set off one of those insect bombs in the bedroom, washed every washable item with bleach, cleaned everything cleanable with soap, was accused of going nuts over it all by my brother, and said, “Oh, please! Tell me something I don’t know!”:rolleyes:
Glad you are getting better. It may still have been a brown recluse. Only rarely do bites go necrotic. All an overblown myth - except for the poor few for which it is real. Now you know you do not react that way, you can stop panicking all together. So glad you are on the mend.
I wish I could, but unfortunately I’m still working on all the other things there are to panic about. Anyway, thanks so much. Hopefully, there will be no more bites! I’m trying to think of what might have happened to cause it, because I honestly can’t remember the last time I got bitten that way and I keep think that something new might have triggered it, and one thing I can pinpoint is that I brought in an outdoor plant. So, back out it went. :smack:
I moved to a place with tons of spiders - a real menagerie of all different shapes and sizes - and many very freaky looking. At first I was completely creeped out and kept killing them. It didn’t work. Now I’ve learned to like them. They kill mosquitoes - which is huge, because I live near wetlands and the mosquitoes here actually *can *make you sick.
And spiders are interesting and even…cute. It’s true. The way a little spider will spin a beautiful little web in some unexpected place (between my pencils in a pencil jar), and then just sit there in the middle patiently waiting to catch something. It makes me smile. I get spider bites every now and then, but nothing ever comes of it except a little itching.
Basically if you can get it into your head that spiders won’t hurt you, you can learn to appreciate them and not poison your whole house because you found one dead in your bed.
uglybeech - you have made my day! It took me a while to get over my arachnophobia. I now enjoy my house spiders immensely.
Anise - the spier most likely just wandered in. The reason you got bitten this time was it hid in the bed and you squashed it. Most bites I hear of are when spiders sometimes get trapped against the skin by clothes or bedclothes. The vast majority of the time, they just stay as far from you as they can. Big creatures, as far as spiders are concerned, eat them.
Anyway, thanks so much. Hopefully, there will be no more bites! I’m trying to think of what might have happened to cause it, because I honestly can’t remember the last time I got bitten that way and I keep think that something new might have triggered it, and one thing I can pinpoint is that I brought in an outdoor plant. So, back out it went. :smack: