on the farm

[kettunainen]

I am incredibly crispy and soooooorrrrrrre. Spent Sunday and Monday with Nikos' parents at their retirement property shoveling huge mounds of soil for hours at a time, raking rocks, driving a li'l tractor, swimming, canoeing (successfully for the first time ever!), and... washing Kiska

Comments

[tamago23]

Although we do have black widow spiders and brown recluse spiders up here, I don't know anyone that's ever actually seen one in Ontario. I can find accounts on message boards, but out of all my friends and acquaintances who go camping and spend time in outdoor areas, I've never heard of anyone spotting one.

With that said, I think a lot of people would see a brown recluse and just think "small brown spider". They may have seen one and not identified it properly. As for black widows, if you know what the body shape looks like, they're pretty hard not to detect. (Although I will point out that immature black widows do NOT have a red hourglass, so don't look for that to identify them. Sometimes they can have white stripes across their abdomen, and other times they may have a small red dot (or dots), or they may have no markings at all.)

Try to stay away from woodpiles and keep your eyes low to the ground; black widows usually build their webs a few inches off the ground (so convenient for your ankles).

[kettunainen]

good to know, my spider-lovin' friend! I'd heard of black widows in southern ontario before, but not brown recluses. Though the common brown house spider here looked suspiciously brown reclusey when I first moved here (very familiar with these vile li'l bastards, to the point of paranoia, actually), I quickly learned that it's not -- smaller petapalps and zigzags/stripes in place of violin. Just had to convince myself of that reality every time I saw one. *jitters*

And while I saw black spiders, none of them had that hard, pointiness that black widows seem to have. These were all soft, fuzzy li'l guys.

[tamago23]

Ha, I feel the same way about black widows. If you go out at night in southern California you can see one every few feet along the edge of the sidewalk or at the base of bushes. o_O I admire them and they're fascinating, but I don't ever want a fang-to-skin encounter with one.

Now, although I don't want to spook you, I should point out that there is a spider similar to the brown recluse. While it isn't actually a recluse spider, it's also poisonous, looks similar, and causes the same sort of bites (sometimes referred to as "wet" bites that can cause necrotizing arachnidism, which is the ulcerated bite that doesn't heal for a long time) and they're much, much more common than brown recluses. When most people think they've been bitten by a brown recluse, they've actually been bitten by a hobo spider (Tegenaria agrestis). There's a good site about hobo spiders here. It's indigenous to the northwestern U.S. and Canada but there have been isolated reports of hobo spiders being spotted elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada, and they seem to be

[tamago23]

Ha! You'll find this funny. I managed to ID my mystery spider - it's a "lynx spider". :)