Tips for warding off spiders?

[KenM K]

you can pretty much fog spiders out of your house. Black Widows are common but destroy mama and the egg sacs quickly, be on the lookout for randomized webs (webs with no patterns) and notable strength (a little stronger than most normal webs) and you'll be Okileedokilee

Yeah in Vegas we have a lot of Black Widows. My patio gets a lot of webs i would leave them be buy i have mall dogs that are nosey that i am more afraid of getting bit then i am myself.

 

[HandofCod]

Contrary to popular belief, there are no poisonous snakes in Australia. All the spiders have eaten them.

 

[Joezilla]

On a side note, I have found many black widow spiders in shipments of produce, and even had them walk on me. Never have I been bitten by one, so I believe they are not as aggressive as some folks may have been led to believe. These "brown recluse" spiders are something I only looked into recently. From what I have read, not everyone reacts the same way to one of their bites. Some folks experience necrosis of the flesh while others show no serious symptoms at all. I don't know what determines how a person's body reacts to one of these bites, but I'd rather not find out the hard way what would happen to me should I get bit myself!

Commander, check this out about brown recluse bites

http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html

http://dermatology.cdlib.org/DOJvol5num2/special/recluse.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071344/

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/5010

 

[jfn]

I used to have a moderate arachnophobia.
Decided to get over it last summer with the help of a family of cellar spiders in my basement.
We had a deal: I didn't squish them and they didn't flip out and kill me. Worked out well for both parties.
But the first few times I went down to do my laundry...

 

[The REAL Commander]

Commander, check this out about brown recluse bites

http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html

http://dermatology.cdlib.org/DOJvol5num2/special/recluse.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071344/

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/5010

Thanks for the links, well worth reading! :thumbup: I actually never heard of "brown recluse" spiders until a couple of years ago. I asked my son, and he told me he heard of them through an internet hoax that was going around, but otherwise he had no prior knowledge of them either. The only information I have found to date concerning the severity of an actual confimed bite is that necrosis is extremely rare, something like 3% if memory serves, and mostly the bite goes unnoticed and without any ill efeects. I'm just wondering if maybe a bite from one of these guys can leave the wound more vulnerable to infection from other bcateria, and that the spider's venom itself has little to do with the tissue damage. For example, the fangs make the holes, and the venom might destroy white cells at the puncture site, allowing easy entry of other baddies in the dirt and on the skin... or who knows, maybe the spider carries parasites, fungi or something similar on it's self. It just seems strange that all of a sudden I started hearing about these "brown recluse" spiders but cannot find a whole lot of reliable info on them.

 

[warrigal]

Let me preface tis with I really don't like spiders and have been know to shoot them.
I was supposed to set the lights and noise for my Army cadets to record while in their OP ( observation post) after they arrived from a night navex. I got there early, after waiting what I thought was a reasonable time I started walking down the track they had to intersect ( after the cross country bit) to find the OP's locaion. As I walked a little ways down the track my ( anti-) spidiey sence went into overdrive. I put in the red led on my Petzl E+lite and right in the middle of the track was the biggest Goldn Orb Spider I had ever seen.
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/spider-40.jpg
Obviously the kids hadn't come down this bit of the track yet because there was a couple days worth of web.
I retreated to the position I had selected and waited, shortly after that I heard a blood curdling scream as one of the female recruits ( learning Night nav) walked straight into the big web.
Cruel but LOL
Carl