Is This Spider Story For Real?

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Andy Avram
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Joined: June 7th, 2010, 10:37 am
Location: NE Ohio

Is This Spider Story For Real?

Post by Andy Avram »

http://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/s ... e-26106285

I don't doubt that there may have been a bunch of spiders in that house, but all Brown Recluse? And BR falling from the shower, I was under the impression they are like most spiders that build webs... not prone to wandering.

Also, as one comment pointed out, what the heck would that many spiders be eating in one house? Seems like there would be an additional insect problem to have those kind of spider numbers.
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gbin
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Re: Is This Spider Story For Real?

Post by gbin »

My wife and I once lived in a rental house in rural north-central FL that was infested by an amazing number of spiders. We attributed it to the fact that the previous tenants were disgusting pigs who apparently routinely threw edible garbage into the backyard for their dog, which dragged it all under the deck attached to the back of the house. In other words, there was a lot of food available to the spiders in the form of insect pests. We thoroughly cleaned the place up as soon as we moved in, including under that deck (a nasty, scary job!), and that took care of the insect pests pretty quickly but the spiders persisted at incredibly high density for the remainder of our time in that house. (We refused to use pesticides on them.) Spiders (of at least some species, anyway) must be able to go long periods with little or no food.

Ours weren't brown recluses, thank goodness, but I can see how such a thing could happen, especially if the house/yard also contained a lot of clutter. As I understand it, brown recluses make pretty lousy webs and instead rely much more on clutter. And there are definitely a lot of brown recluses in MO, which is pretty much in the center of their range.

But the place in the story you linked was a fairly expensive home in a country club neighborhood, which doesn't sound like the kind of place where there would have been a lot of edible garbage and clutter around at any point in the past. I don't know... It's a weird story, all right!

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simus343
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Re: Is This Spider Story For Real?

Post by simus343 »

A little late on this but it may have been possible, especially because brown recluses utilize clutter more than webs, as noted.

When I lived in Australia my family lived in a high end neighborhood with no insect issues - but we did quickly find out why there wasn't any insect issues. Our neighbors house and the yards in the neighborhood were plagued with red-back spiders. They utilize messy webs, similar to North American black widows. The thing is, there was so many that they were appearing in showers, toilets, beds, closets, pantries, behind the Tele, on the Tele, under couches, on couches, I'm sure you all get the point. People would even get their houses poisoned, sprayed, etc. But, like many Arthropods, once most of them died, the resistant individuals survived, giving rise to generations of resistant spiders. We also had scorpions, trapdoors, and white-tailed spiders - the last of which we were told are dangerous but since then I have learned mixed details on this that says they are not dangerous.

Point of this being, I certainly believe that there could have been spiders, that do not mostly utilize fixed webs, plaguing a home in an up-scale neighborhood because it happened to me with spiders that do utilize fixed webs in an up-scale neighborhood.
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