Pacific NW spider - What kind is this?

Factual Questions
1

  • Black or very dark brown

  • Shiny, thick black legs

  • Slightly hairy body

  • Large fangs

2

Did it look like this?

Or like this?

Or how about like this?

The first two are Hobo spiders (female and male respectively) and the third is a brown recluse spider.

You probably don’t want to know this, but the Hobo spiders are very aggressive (especially the females). If you get bitten, you could get something that looks like this.

3

If it looks like either, don’t go near where you saw it. They are very poisonous. I know the brown recluses live inside non-touched clothes/boxes, and they hunt in beds for their food, so far as I have read, I have not interviewed them to verify. Anyway, you don’t want either. If the spider was in your house, spray for the buggers. No sense getting bitten and dying or having a limb amputated now is there?

Granted, if it was a brown recluse, many of them are not deadly-poisonous, unless you are allergic of course. I have been bitten by two by my heart (two locales, many years apart) and only have scars from them.

How big was it? Dime-sized, quarter-sized, hand-sized (No, we do not like Goliath South American Bird-Eating Spiders running amok)?

4

Slightly larger than a dime and smaller than a nickel. The reason for the OP is that I havn’t ever seen this spider before and wasn’t able to find a picture of it anywhere on the web.

It was almost totally black - rare for the Pacific NW. I wonder if it was some strange breed of the hobo.

5

Ah.

Sounds like your classic Smushy Icky Little Spider. Smushing or calling upon a brave-but-silly loved one to smush them is a good call of action.

At least so thinks I, not having had the Icky Little Spider class in high school. :slight_smile:

6

Spiders give me the heebie-jeebies. But I love them all the same. In seventh grade Life Science, the teacher took a liking to me (I was big on class participation back then), and let me try my hand at identifying various spiders he had found. Nothing big and spooky, mind you; merely those cute, harmless jumping spiders (which, incidentally, have among the best visual capabilities among the arachnids).

Much fun. You should see some of the spiders in rural, swampy central Florida. They’re huge. I saw one the size of my hand once, and I have large hands! Spooky. I think they are merely giant wolf spiders, but whatever they are, they really scare me, although I love staring at those spooky little buggers.

We also have what we call the ‘writing spider’, which is so called for it’s tendency to make interesting patterns on their webs. Then there’s the gaudily-coloured ‘banana spider’, known for creeping around my Grandma’s livingroom floor, and suprising me when I walk in the woods with their huge webs. Florida has tons of spiders, snakes, and other unsavoury little things that could potentially poison me in my sleep. Stay away from Florida, okay? It’s for your own good. I mean it. Only visit here if you’re immune to all poisons.