Posted on 04/26/2011 1:07:00 AM PDT by Daffynition
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2011) — One of the most feared spiders in North America is the subject a new study that aims to predict its distribution and how that distribution may be affected by climate changes.
When provoked, the spider, commonly known as the brown recluse (Loxosceles reclusa), injects powerful venom that can kill the tissues at the site of the bite. This can lead to a painful deep sore and occasional scarring.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Sounds dreadful. Reminds me of the residual effects of Lyme disease.
That’s better. lol
It/they can be. Sometimes recluse spider bites can be intensely nasty, kill tissue for amazingly long periods of time, months, even years. Nothing good about them at all. A seriously bad bite can turn into a non-healing, painful, prone to infection area like a major bad burn that nothing works on. Profoundly bad news.
The range of the brown recluse has already been expanded by hitching a ride in my personal effects when the Army sent me to West Germany in 1978. I know this because I got a bite on my right calf that the medics couldn’t figure out until the PA saw the festering wound. Antibiotics, both oral and topical, along with a regular debridement with hydrogen peroxide cleared it up and I have no scar today.
You are lucky. From my personal experience,
military medics know a lot about debridement techniques.
I had areas of exposed bone on 1/4 of my forehead and my left eye swelled shut for over a week.
Herb compresses with activated charcoal will take the pain away and heal them right up from the inside out.
If only they hadn’t all frozen to death this past winter.
We have plenty of Recluse here in Florida. Not sure that map is all that accurate, or perhaps just not up to date.
The map is wrong. We have those spiders here in Florida. I know because I’ve been bitten. Way before globull warming too.
That map is so wrong. We have them here in SE Virginia. I personally know two people that have been bitten by one. Nasty spider.
We have brown recluse and black widows here in Florida. We also have a variety of an orb spider which gets big. We call them banana spiders because they are yellow and black. Smaller bodies with long legs. Some will get as big as your hand although most aren’t quite that big.
They like to build webs between trees across open spaces. While hunting one time I turned a corner on a trail and walked right into one of these nests. Got a face full of the web. Saw the hand sized spider hanging about 12 inches from my face. I backed away but of course I had his web all over, so he followed me.
In the movie “Indiana Jones And the Raiders of the Lost Ark”, there is a scene when they remove the entrance to some Egyptian sarcophagus, and when they took a look inside, they could see snakes wriggling on the floor. The big heavyset guy says “Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.” Indiana Jones rolls over on his back, looks at the sky and moans “Snakes. Why does it always have to be snakes?”.
That’s me with spiders.
When I was seven years old, I tried to crawl through a drainage pipe that went under a road. I could see the other side, so I thought it would be neat.
I wiggled my way in, and was about 15 feet in when I suddenly noticed the pipe was getting narrower. Next thing I knew, I couldn’t budge forward, and could only wiggle slightly backward.
I was lying on leaves, twigs and junk, arms out in front of me, and turned my head to say something to my older brother who was standing outside, when I saw that a huge cobweb and got squished all over my neck and shoulder.
And stuck right in it, was a big, huge, Daddy Longlegs. Just like the one on the Johnny Quest cartoon. Staring at me, with that single (I thought) eye.
That pipe immediately became skin-tight and I began to scream and wiggle in a most horrible fashion. Somehow, my brother wiggled in behind me, grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me out.
Next thing I knew, I was running down the middle of a residential street, screaming loudly, jumping in the air and twirling in a way that would have made a professional figure skater jealous, all the while beating my head and shoulders madly.
Every single time I glanced back, like a dog with tin cans tied to its tail, that Daddy Longlegs was still there...bouncing around, just within my field of view.
My brother got it off me, and even though I do not remember how I knew, I somehow found out that damned Daddy Longlegs was a corpse stuck in the web. It was one of my most frightening childhood experiences.
To this day, I harbor an irrational fear when I feel or see one on my body. I cannot kill them...they ARE interesting, and I find them fascinating, but...they still bring out some kind of primal fear in my gut, if even for a fleeting fraction of a second if one is on me.
When I lived in the Philippines as a kid, I was completely into the whole concept of all the bizarre, slimy, wiggly and crawling things that they had, and they had a lot of them. We used to think it was great, we would go out into the jungle and just wander around for hours. One day, as I was walking down a trail, I saw this enormous web. It was a HUGE spider web, I would estimate that the span of the web must’ve been my entire arms length. And sitting off to the side on it was the most hideous looking spider I had ever seen. It was striped black and orange, and it looked like it must’ve been as big as my hand. I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes succumb to my imagination, and it is entirely possible that that spider was nowhere that big… but it sure as hell looked like it. But here’s the bad part.
Unbelievably, as I was walking back the same way later on, I walked right into that web. I couldn’t believe it… I have no idea where that spider was, or what happened to it (I would venture that it saw me coming straight for it and ran away up a tree or something…) but I flailed around with that big nasty ass web all covering my face and ears. As I whipped around in little circles on my face and head, I knew… I just KNEW that damned spider was crawling on my back somewhere.
Another time, I was driving down the road at night, and...a little itty bitty spider begins to lower itself from the ceiling of my car...right...in front of my nose.
So here I am, driving down a twisty New England road doing about 45 mph, at night, and I am completely fixated on this spider about three inches from the front of my face...inching slowly down towards my crotch.
I cannot take my eyes off of it for a second to look at the road. Just as I was coming to grips with the situation, doesn’t the damn thing just DROP and disappear into my lap.
I damn near wrecked my car. But I always wondered how my face looked to the spider...kind of fisheye distorted, bug eyed and crosseyed, with a great gaping black mouth slowly opening to reveal a waving uvula at the back of my throat as I yelled.
And all this isn’t because I am squeamish...I lived in the Philippines, and they had dang near every variety of bizzare huge beetle with enormous mandibles like Tiger Beetles, Rhinocerous Beetles, and the prized and rare, Ox Beetles. They had lizards, geckos, snakes, monkeys, boars, monitor lizards and God knows what else...but it was only the spiders that freaked me out.
BTW...I DO know Daddy Longlegs aren’t really spiders, and I DO know they are completely beneficial and harmless, but...still scary to me. Some childhood phobias just die hard.
Nevermind that the US just had one of its coldest winters in decades.
I found this ugly sucker in front of my house, and since it wasn't in the house on on me, I didn't kill it. Besides, can you imagine the squishy green and yellow spider guts mess this thing would make? I would have to fumigate my shoe, or throw in the trash permanently whatever it was I would kill it with.
Besides, I found out these particular things aren't poisonous or harmful.
But I still don't want the bloody thing crawling down my arm.
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