Normally garden spiders are placid and don't bite [but they can and do] ...but I decided there was no room for both of us and I turned around and brought him to the shore and flicked him onto the beach to torment someone else.
Posted on 08/31/2013 4:22:53 PM PDT by Morgana
FULL TITLE: How FOUR cops rushed to kill spider in wheelchair-bound teen's home after she called 911 fearing it could have killed her
Police in Portland, Oregon, received an unusual call earlier this month when a teenager phoned requesting assistance to deal with a ‘massive’ spider.
The caller, Makenna Sewell, wasn’t a prankster or someone with an extreme phobia of spiders, but instead suffers from muscular dystrophy and is wheelchair-bound.
She believed the spider was a brown recluse, a species with venom so toxic that it could have been deadly for her compromised immune system.
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Sewell was home alone on August 16 when she saw the creature, which she described as being about three inches across.
Just a few days prior, her mom Shawnda had been bitten by a spider on the back of her leg during the night, which had resulted in a nasty wound and a trip to the emergency room.
Initially Sewell tried to call her mother, her father, the friends her parents were with, her own friends and two neighbors.
When she couldn’t reach anyone, Sewell decided to call the non-emergency police hotline as a last resort.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
We have black bears in Ohio too. rarely. because this isn’t their normal range.
The brown recluse.
The info on that page is most likely accurate ... but it doesn't make me feel much better about Brown Recluses.
Normally garden spiders are placid and don't bite [but they can and do] ...but I decided there was no room for both of us and I turned around and brought him to the shore and flicked him onto the beach to torment someone else.
I don't believe it either. I was bitten by one at Ft. Bragg, NC.
Some spiders have a *boss* attitude.
Nearly every spider I kill in my house looks like a brown recluse. For a time that is what I thought they were.
The easiest tip off that they are not is my spiders have spiny hairs on their legs while the recluse doesn’t. Mine do have the violin shape on their top side. Their eyes are also a little bit different.
They are also about the same shape, size and color..
I did read an article in Outdoor Life several years ago that there are actually more than just the black widow and brown recluse which are venomous. For that reason I kill every one I see.
They occasionally are found outside of their normal range and ususally it's because they hitched a ride but more often than not people think they were bitten by one but were not. IMO, being bitten by a recluse is kind of like being bitten by a shark. When it happens, there's not a lot of question about it. I have seen limbs lost over recluse bites. Everyone that comes though my ER thinks every bug bite they have is a recluse bite. We joke about it frequently because they almost never are.
How did you manage to trap a wolf spider? They are sooo fast. We can find them in houses here occasionally.
I think I killed 2 of them in our bathroom this week. ICK!
The “Hourglass” is the black widow. The “Violin” is the brown recluse.
It is known and documented there are brown recluse spiders in the storage area of the court house in Grand Island, NE. They like the cardboard boxes. I was given a mushed spider to identify the local police department was sure was a brown recluse here in town, south central Nebraska. I did not think so, but I do think it is never wise to reach into anything stored or otherwise, if you can not see where you are reaching.
Fortunately, as was explained to me, it had got into my sleeve and bitten me right at the bend of the elbow where a lot of the venom was absorbed by the thick calloused skin and they debrided most of that away.
Even so, I had an extreme case of cellulitis from my elbow to my wrist - I looked like Popeye for about two weeks, and over the course of several days, had a considerable amount of pus drained from my arm. That was 23 years ago and I still have a little dimple in my elbow...
“I had a wolf spider about 5 inches long in my garage”
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Yes, they do get quite large. To catch and release I use a large plastic bowl to slap over him. Then slide a piece of cardboard under the bowl. I then take it some 100 ft or so outdoors and toss it into a bush.
Black Widows and Brown Recluse, are the only bad spiders that
I know of throughout the US, but I do see mention of the Hobo Spider in the Pacific northwest.
And I’m not saying they’re incapable of extending their normal range from time to time. I am just saying that 99 times out of 100, it isn’t a brown recluse north of its normal range.
“How did you manage to trap a wolf spider?”
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See post number 55.
The wolf spiders I have seen have been in my house- not a lot of them, but every so often. Normally I use the same technique to remove a spider- place a bowl or something over it, slide a piece of paper or something similar under, and take it outdoors. However I have never been fast enough to catch a wolf spider. By the same token I have never been bitten or anything by one either.
One of my neighbors, two streets over, got bitten by several brown recluse spiders in NC, just north of Charlotte. He had to wear an antibiotic pack on his hip to give him antibiotics for six weeks. First bite was from a spider in his shrubbery bed and then the second and third bites were from some hidden in his closet.
Every once in a while I come home from work and find a coffee cup upside down on the living room floor.
That’s about as far as the wife will go when she finds a creepy-crawlie in the house, then leaves it for me to dispose of.
I usually just slide a paper underneath, then throw them into the neighbor’s yard.
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