Brown Recluse Spider: Wonder Why You Fear Spiders?

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parsifal said:
Suggest you never visit Australia then...look up the Funnel web redback and trapdoor spiders.

These are all mortally venomous.

However, I am more scareed of the white tips and such. They dont kill you, they just give you a bite that virtually never heals. My brother almost lost his eye because one bit him whilst he was sleeping.

To be honest, the hype is much worse than the relaity. hardly anyone gets bitten
Click to expand...

Yup. We get tonnes of white tails, found 9 one night in the kitchen!

Luckily the Funnel webs are generally found further up the coast ( female is more venemous than the black widow ) but again lots of Redbacks crusing around my house. Plus others and then theres the snakes..........
 
I've read about the friggin' freaks of nature you guys have Down Under. Thank god I'm in animal control here and not there! :)
 
For those that understand medical terms:

Brown recluse venom, like many of the other brown spider venoms, is cytotoxic and hemolytic. It contains at least 8 components, including enzymes such as hyaluronidase, deoxyribonuclease, ribonuclease, alkaline phosphatase, and lipase. Sphingomyelinase D is thought to be the protein component responsible for most of the tissue destruction and hemolysis caused by brown recluse spider envenomation. The intense inflammatory response mediated by arachidonic acid, prostaglandins, and chemotactic infiltration of neutrophils is amplified further by an intrinsic vascular cascade involving the mediator C-reactive protein and complement activation. These and other factors contribute to the local and systemic reactions of necrotic arachnidism.

Although numerous cases of cutaneous and viscerocutaneous reactions have been attributed to spiders of the genus Loxosceles, confirming the identity of the envenomating arachnid is difficult and rarely accomplished.
eMedicine - Spider Envenomations, Brown Recluse : Article by Thomas Arnold

For those who aren't of the medical mind, cytotoxic is basically poison that kills tissue, like the above. Hemolytic refers to the blood, and a poisoning of in this case. So what you have in Brown Recluse venom is a poison cocktail that note only kills tissue cells, but also effect healthy red blood cells.

The bad new is that it can lead to some pretty bad discomfort and in rare cases, death. The good news is that cases like those pictured above are not common.

There are Brown Recluse Spiders in South America that have more potent venom kill a few people a year there.
 
One more thing. Black Widow venom is not as potent as that found in the Recluse and no one has died from a Black Widow bite in over 10 years in the US. I still don't take chances with widows. See, kill. I wear work gloves while working in the garage and garden for a reason. I remember grabbing a box from my garage once, moving it to the other side. As I went to wipe my brow with the back of my hand, there was a good sized black widow. The glove came off like a goon at a hockey game! :lol:
 
Aussies love to scare the euros with their stories of snakes spiders and scorpions. You can almost see their eyes go wide and the sweat beads on their foreheads
 
Mat308, I have them around my house in New Mexico.Got bit by one last summer while sitting on the front pourch one evening. I had just finished ten days of antibiotics for a sinus infection. I got a red bump with a blister, popped the blister,put on First Aid creme. Except for a scar, it was gone within about two weeks. -Karl
 
My wife is actually in the process of doing some research on arachnids as part of her studies.

We were discussing the Brown Recluse because I was bitten by a spider when I was 14 in N. Carolina and the Doctors said it was a Brown Recluse but it never really did anything but swell up and hurt.

Anyhow back to what I was saying my wife tells me that the majority of Brown Recluse bites never get worse than a painfull swelling. The crazy stuff you see up there is called necrosis and actually are very very rare.
 
Hey Matt what county are you in? I've sometimes gone out to various parks in Whatcom San Juan, or Skagit, and been up to Moses Lake many times. Am I likely to find one of these nasties?
 
Yep. More so in Moses Lake. I'm in King County, just north of Pierce County.

And Adler, my favorite unused band name... StuntFish. As an aspirer for Alaska living, you should know the origin.
 
Oh, and for those who keep their boots in the garage like me, I beat the hell out of them before I put them on. I remember as a kid in California going to drink out of a garden faucet and the first thing that came out was a Black Widow. Never have forgotten. [does the Willie Dance]
 
Couple years back i was cuttin wood for my mom in the back, pretty hot and sunny so took my shirt off and was cutting through a 3 foot log and finished ,brushing my self off couldnt figure out why my stomach still felt like woodchips............apparently i hit a nest of B/W found no less than 5 crawlin up my chest
 
I'm just happy to live thousands of miles away from Brown Recluse or Black Widow spiders.

I'm pretty sure that we only have one species poisonous snake, the Adder, and that avoids humans anyway...

Living somewhere safe outweighs the drawbacks of the dreary weather imo.. :p
 
Matt308 said:
Oh, and for those who keep their boots in the garage like me, I beat the hell out of them before I put them on. I remember as a kid in California going to drink out of a garden faucet and the first thing that came out was a Black Widow. Never have forgotten. [does the Willie Dance]
Click to expand...

Back about 1986 we were living in South Carolina and my sister went to take a shower. She came back downstairs screaming saying a black spider had come out of the ventilation above the shower. My mom went up there and found a black widow clinging to the shower head.

Later that day my mom went up into the attic and found a nest of them right above the ventilation shaft.

We had to have pest control come out and kill them all.

Matt308 said:
As an aspirer for Alaska living, you should know the origin.
Click to expand...

Actually no...
 
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