# WAY OT: what kind of spider is this?



## Howard2k (Feb 9, 2005)

Found in my garage (Burlington, Ontario)


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Ohhh one cool looking spider :clap: I don;t know much but from browsing it might be a weaver of some sort by the shape.
http://www.rochedalss.qld.edu.au/orbweaver.htm


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## MacNutt (Jan 16, 2002)

Is it still alive? If so, then carefully flip it over with a posicle stick and look for a yellow or orange mark on the underside of the abdomen.

I don't recognise the speckles on top...but the rest of it sure looks like a black widow to me. We have lots of those out here.


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## Howard2k (Feb 9, 2005)

I hate them lol. But that one was interesting. Just wanted to make sure it was nothing to be concerned about but it looks like it's not.


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## Howard2k (Feb 9, 2005)

MacNutt said:


> Is it still alive? If so, then carefully flip it over with a posicle stick and look for a yellow or orange mark on the underside of the abdomen.
> 
> I don't recognise the speckles on top...but the rest of it sure looks like a black widow to me. We have lots of those out here.


I wanted to check that but it got away. I didn't have a decent chance to look.


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## MacNutt (Jan 16, 2002)

Not to worry too much. Black widows are everywhere out here. And I can think of no cases of death as a result of a bite. My youngest brother was bitten by a black widow twice when he was young...and he's still here.

He did get pretty sick the second time. And all the veins in his leg lit up like a neon sign.  

Luckily, they are pretty shy critters. Not agressive at all.


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## Carex (Mar 1, 2004)

The neighbors kids caught a black widow and had it in an old fish tank. It was in his bedroom, and, being young boys, they were of course setting up colossal battles with other insects. That is of course until mom found out the identity of the little critter. Then it was banished to the garage. 

The spider you have there is similar to one a friend of mine took a picture of a few years ago. His had a perfect looking skull outline on the top of the abdomen.


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## Howard2k (Feb 9, 2005)

Errm... The pictures that your friend took were not a black widow were they?


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## Heart (Jan 16, 2001)

ick!


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## sinjin (Jul 12, 2003)

*Not a black widow*

That is a beautiful spider. 

I'm pretty sure by the body and the fact that you found it lurking in your garage that it is in the same family as the black widow: Theridiidae, common name "comb-footed spiders".

This is a large group of spiders in North America. They all typically have that large, almost spherical, hind segment (opisthosoma, the "head" section is a prosoma), slender, tapering, bent legs and a shiny, almost hard, exoskeleton. If it was a clumsy walker (rather than a speed demon) that would cinch it for me.

The patterns you see on these guys, and even more so, the orb weavers, are incredible. I once saw one with the spitting image of a "fleur de li" on the banks of Hog's Back Falls in Ottawa.

FWIW, these spiders (and the widow) are not aggressive, only biting in defense.


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## MacNutt (Jan 16, 2002)

I concur.

I've been around black widows whenever I've lived back here at home...pretty much every warm dark area of our west coast houses contains a black widow or two. Or twelve. 

You turn over a plank or move some forgotten furniture in a dark corner of your basement...and there is a black widow. They usually freeze when discovered. You can kill em with a quick smack from a slipper. They are not in the least bit agressive, unless you antagonise them.

I usually recognise them by the large teardrop shaped aft section. It's most often very shiny, like a satin christmas ornament. And, if you happen to turn one over, there is often a striking bright orange or yellow marking on the underside. Sometimes shaped like an hourglass.

They are quite different looking from the run of the mill spiders around here. But I have no fear of them. They are everywhere, but I only know one person who has ever been bitten by one of them. (TWICE!) My youngest brother.

And he's still here. Hale and hearty.


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## Carex (Mar 1, 2004)

Just watch out for the brown recluse while you are in BC.


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## MacNutt (Jan 16, 2002)

We have those here?

Care to post a photo of one? Just so's I know what I might be stomping to death with my bare foot, first thing in the morning?


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## Carex (Mar 1, 2004)

This spider has a light brown body and legs. The cephalothorax (head united with thorax) has a darker brown violin-shaped mark on the upper side. The female constructs an irregular web outdoors and indoors in undisturbed dry locations such as basements, garages, closets, and farm outbuildings. The web is not usually used to trap insect prey. Instead, the brown recluse is a hunter, emerging from its hiding place at night in search of small insects for food. Favorite hiding places are in seldom-used clothing hanging in dark closets, in boxes of magazines, papers and other stored items, on the underside of furniture, in cracks and spaces around baseboards, around window and door facings, and in dark cellars and garages.

Most victims are bitten after they put on clothes stored in a secluded closet or that have been laying on the floor, when cleaning closets or storage areas, or when they roll on a spider while in bed. Initially, there may be little or no pain from a brown recluse bite, but, over the course of several hours, an intense localized pain develops, followed by inflammation of the area. Within a few days, a large ulcerous sore forms around the bite. This sore heals very slowly and leaves a large disfiguring scar. There is no specific anti-venom available for brown recluse toxin, but various other treatments are used to promote healing. Early diagnosis and treatment are essential to alleviate pain and speed healing of ulcerated tissue. It can be important to know what spider caused the spider bite to assist with an early diagnosis and treatment. Without a specimen, there is really no way to determine what spider caused a spider bite, but medical personnel assume that if the bite becomes ulcerous, it is the bite from a brown recluse spider.

http://www.hobospider.com/stories/hobostory.html


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## MacNutt (Jan 16, 2002)

I think my cat Moon ate one of those the other day.

She loves to eat spiders...and I woke up to find her frantically wrestling with something on my bed a few days back.

She rapidly dispatched it to a better place...then ate it with some relish...and then proceeded to choke and gag up a bit of undefineable arachnid exoskeleton onto my pillow. Along with some half digested blades of grass and a bit of expensive sushi tuna that I had fed her a few hours before. Right beside my half-awake face.

I was not impressed.

But it sounds like the critter you've just described in your last post. Near as I can tell. 

So, what do you think...should I get myself another cat just for extra protection from this brown recluse spider? And teach her not to honk the corpse of the thing up onto my pillow at such an early hour?

Or should I buy a large caliber handgun, and bypass the "cat solution" entirely?

Anxiously awaiting your answer.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

Carex said:


> Just watch out for the brown recluse while you are in BC.


The brown recluse does not live in BC.

Areas in North America where the Brown Recluse is likely to be found:









The site that you posted, http://www.hobospider.com/stories/hobostory.html is a commercial site which is devoted to selling spider traps to catch hobo spiders, which are native to BC and the north-west. No doubt the stories in there were complete fabrications. That along with a selection of gory pictures all with the aim of panicking people into spending money on their goods.

Hobo spiders are around here and can have nasty, although not fatal bites, but are much rarer than the "giant house spider", which it is easily confused with. 

This is a hobo spider.









The following pdf link has some information on the hobo and how difficult it is to tell it from the "giant house spider". http://pep.wsu.edu/pdf/PLS116_1.pdf

It is said that the best defense against hobo spiders is to have other spiders in your house competing with them. I have no problem with that since there are callobius spiders everywhere. These spiders naturally live in the bark crevices in Douglas Firs and are everywhere here. People commonly call them wolf spiders, but they're not anything like wolf spiders.

Oh and MacNutt, you can come down off of your chair now and please, just put the gun down, everything will be all right.


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## gwillikers (Jun 19, 2003)

You're right GA, I had a discussion with my doctor about a bite I had on my finger (years ago). I took 2 months to heal, turned black, and was nasty. He has seen many cases where bites resemble those of the brown recluse. Like my bite, all of them were most likely a hobo bite. I feel better believing that, at least.  

I've killed Hobo's, and giant house spiders... and I break into a sweat everytime. To me they are SO big! But I'm a prairie boy, and I'm just not used to these big boys now that I'm living on the west coast. The funny thing is that my wife is actually better at killing them than I am. My masculinity is compromised whenever one of those big boys runs across the carpet. 

"Honeybunch, there's a huge spider in front of the T.V.!! If you can get him, that's cool. But if not... I guess I could get him. Up to you though!"


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## duosonic (Jan 7, 2004)

The hobo spider it is - not brown recluse, which does not live up here (BC). The hobo, & some related species, have an AWFUL bite. Both I & my spice have experienced bites from unidentified (because we weren't fast enough to catch them) spiders, that took months to heal & left lasting nerve damage (I still, 9 years later, have a "dead" spot on my leg leftover from a spider bite). However, most spiders are harmless. We share spider catching/killing duties – & I must admit it's traumatic each & every time I have to trap one & put it outside (I'd rather trap & release than kill).


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## Carex (Mar 1, 2004)

Being a transplanted prairie boy myself, my first experience with large BC wolf spiders was harrowing to say the least. I was lying on the floor watching TV in a basement suite when I first moved to Vancouver. I heard a noise, yes a noise, that made me get up. The noise was that of a wolf spider running across the floor. I could actually here it running!! Them's big spiders!! 

Glad we don't have tarantulas.

GA, those are good links; very informative.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

Yeah, some of the larger callobius spiders in my house make a noise as their little feet grab onto the bedroom's wooden ceiling. Then you hear a soft "thunk" as they fall down on top of the comforter. 

I'm an advocate of not unnecessarily killing spiders. I find that since I've moved out to the boonies, most of my urban arachnophobia has decreased and I actually find them quite fascinating to watch. There's still a residual amount, which I think is probably genetic, so I still shiver involuntarily, when one crawls out of the shirt that I just took out of the closet and put on. An inbred fear of spiders probably was a good survival tactic for our distant ancestors, who lived in nature.

I've only had one spider bite that I've noticed, in over 6 years of living here. Spiders don't want to bite you, since you aren't prey and they'll only do so if they're being threatened with imminent death by your giant body rolling over on them. For them to bite you would be like you trying to bite the side of a jumbo jet.

You can pick them up with your bare hands without being bitten, which I've seen people do, although that's something that I can't quite do myself. 

They do a lot of good around the house actually, eating other bugs, like some of the ones who are trying to eat my house, or the moths that want to eat my clothes. You just have to keep them on their toes by getting them to break it up when they start to build little spider condos in an area of the house. 

I used to do the catch and release thing with a jar and a piece of card, that I kept ready. I found a neat little implement at Lee Valley, just for catching spiders and other things like bees that might get in the house. It's a little clear plastic container on the end of a wand. The container has a sliding door on the bottom. You just open it, place it over your victim and turn it, to slide the door shut. Then you can carry it outside and leave them in the garden. The container's big enough to get some of big females that are around here, that can be close to 2" in diameter.


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## Carex (Mar 1, 2004)

We don't kill spiders either unless we are really in a bad mood. They are usually live captured and released 'to the wild'. We wouldn't want to be responsible for 6 weeks of rain now would we. 

Being that we live in an A-frame, it makes for lots of nooks and crannies for spiders to occupy. It's not like I'm going to be crawling up to the top of the 24 foot ceiling everyday to deal with spider webs. We are secure in the fact that they are providing a free service and they keep the more squeamish of guests away from our house.


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## gwillikers (Jun 19, 2003)

Carex said:


> We don't kill spiders either unless we are really in a bad mood.


I'm a very sensitive person, honest, but my really bad mood begins the moment one of those monsters appears in my space.  

Catch & release eh? Sorry, just can't go there at this stage in my evolution. I'll work on it though. Perhaps some professional counselling...


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## The Doug (Jun 14, 2003)

I don't kill spiders; it's live and let live as far as I'm concerned. In fact I generally find spiders fascinating. 

However when I see a Yellow Sac Spider I put it outside. These bite more readily than Hobo and Brown Recluse spiders, and you're more likely to have Yellow Sacs in your home than Hobos and Brown Recluses. Often, what people think is a Hobo or Brown Recluse bite actually came from a Yellow Sac.


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