I bought a house a few months ago. The house is perfect except for a spider situation. There are many large spiders that I would rather not have inside the house. Yes, I know . . . spiders are great, they eat other insects, they do not contribute to global warming, etc. Only problem is I do not want them inside.
So, can you ID this spider, and could you make any suggestions on how to get rid of every last one inside. I am currently killing one or two a day on my ground floor. The house is three stories, all living space. The ground floor would traditionally be a basement, but I have my kitchen, dining room, one bath, laundry, on that floor.
I agree it’s a wolf spider. They will probably be coming indoors this time of year seeking shelter. In addition to sealing around the house, you may have to spray the periphery of the building in order to prevent them from doing so.
IANAExterminator, but this site provides some advice on spider control.
I make no recommendations on what course of action to follow. Personally, I would prefer spiders to pesticides unless it was a dire case.
Thanks! My gf is correct, she has been calling them wolf spiders. We are both mildly arachnophobic and they seem 10x bigger when you walk up on them. My downstairs seems well sealed, but I will get to work on tightening up security!
You know, generally I would agree with you. My gf and I both have placed bat houses to attract bats. We feed the deer, birds, butterflies/etc. We both feel bad about it, but the line is drawn at spiders. We would both even improve the outdoor environment for spiders if they would agree to remain outdoors. Oh well.
Yeah, it can be tough to find somebody to negotiate with. But you’d probably have to put a heater out in the garden and release fruit flies through the winter to get them to agree.
Holy crap! You get huge spiders like that in your house and you live in western Pennsylvania? That’s too close to Jersey for my taste.
I can’t really tell the size of the thing from your photo. Are your spiders big enough to cover an outstretched palm? If they are, I can’t imagine how you can sleep at night knowing that there’s one of those loose in the house.
The only time I have ever seen anything that size out of a zoo is during my trips to Rio de Janeiro, and that’s far enough away from New Jersey that I am able to sleep peacefully. Yuck.
Actually, the spider emissary was even more demanding! I don’t even own the Spiderman soundtrack, and if I did I can’t imagine my neighbors being happy with it blasting over the outdoor speakers.
TwoTrout’s picture is of an enormous monster! That thing is HUGE*. If the ones in your house are as big as that, man if it were me I’d be running screaming into the night. And I am not really afraid of spiders.
*Probably not “huge” for some overgrown jungle but “huge” for PA.
Wolf spiders can get very big out here, you just rarely see them unless you live in a rural area with woods. When I lived in a very rustic part of Maryland I kept a baseball bat by the wood pile to deal with these critters when I grabbed some wood for the fireplace.
Rustic parts of Maryland? Gack! That’s far too close. Next you’ll be saying that they also like “rustic parts of Jersey”
Now that there have been so many “what’s this spider” threads I’ve got to post my own. I’ll try to put a pic of one I saw in Brazil a few weeks ago to see what it is – nothing really huge, but there were several of them on the back wall of the house.
