- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
October is a perfect time to talk about spiders! People decorate for Halloween with scary images of spiders and webs. Many people fear spiders but what you may not know is that they are helpful in our homes and landscapes.
Spiders you might find wandering in your home or hanging out in your garden are beneficial predators, eating pest insects like flies, mosquitoes, and numerous other undesirable bugs in and around landscapes.
Whether you are curious as to what kind of spider you found or you are looking for ways to get rid of them, UC IPM has the information you need in the newly revised free publication, Pest Notes: Spiders. Author...
- Author: Rick Vetter
If you were to ask an audience of more than a few people if they or anyone they know has ever seen or been bitten by a brown recluse spider in California, many hands would be raised. This is quite remarkable because the brown recluse spider has NEVER established breeding populations in California!
The myth of the brown recluse has been generated and sustained by:
- Physician misdiagnoses (where many skin lesions of diverse non-spider origin are blamed on a non-existent spider)
- Media articles that report claims of horrendous bite injury without proof of spider involvement
- Misidentification of harmless brown spiders as brown recluses by the general public as well as "authorities" who lack...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
No we aren't here to tell you we found one. Because brown recluse spiders do not live in California.
Don't believe this last statement? Then please read the recently updated publication Pest Notes: Brown Recluse and Other Recluse Spiders by UC Riverside spider expert Richard S. Vetter.
Brown recluse spiders are among the most talked about spiders in California and one that many other brown spiders from different and non-threatening groups get confused with. But there are actually no populations of brown recluse spiders in California.
We encourage all our subscribers to read the
Unlike mosquitoes, spiders do not seek people in order to bite them. Generally, a spider doesn't try to bite a person unless it has been squeezed, lain on, or similarly provoked to defend itself. Moreover, the jaws of most spiders are so small that the fangs cannot penetrate the skin of an adult person. Sometimes when a spider is disturbed in its web, it may bite instinctively because it mistakenly senses that an insect has been caught.
The severity of a spider bite depends on factors such as the kind of spider, the amount of venom injected, and the age and health of the person bitten. A spider bite might cause no reaction at all, or it might result in varying amounts of itching, redness, stiffness, swelling, and...
The black widow spider is known and feared by many people due to its venomous bite. However, in the past decade in California, a change in widow spider populations has occurred. A newer invasive spider called the brown widow may be displacing black widow spiders in some urban habitats.
Brown widow spiders are now common in urban areas of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Diego and San Bernardino counties. People have also reported finding them in Ventura and Santa Barbara, and experts believe they may eventually be found in other areas of the state.
Residents may be relieved to learn that brown widow spiders are less likely to bite and if they do, the symptoms are more mild than a black widow...