Most of the insects and spiders living in your basement are good for your house, basically because they eat each other, or bits of dirt, or crumbs. This spider, not so much.
Taxonomy: The brown recluse is a spider in the genus Loxosceles. There are several other recluse spiders in this genus, but the one most likely to be in your basement is Loxosceles reclusa.
Description: The brown recluse is a medium-sized brown spider with long legs. One reliable characteristic is the violin-shaped marking on its back.
Lifestyle: This spider hangs out in dark corners of basements and garages, and prowls around by night in search of food and mates. For this reason, it sometimes winds up in contact with humans.
Is it venomous? Yes, extremely. The bite of the brown recluse isn't very painful at first, but gets worse and worse over days and weeks as the venom destroys cells. In very bad cases, large open wounds can form.
Damage to your house: None. In fact, they eat other pests. So going after the brown recluses in your house, which will kill other spiders as well, does have a downside.
What you can do: There are a number of ways to deal with spiders like this. The easiest option is to let them alone, since you'll probably never get bitten. But if you have a large outbreak, a good option is spider sticky traps
. You set them and forget them, and they attract and catch all kinds of spiders, including the brown recluse.
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| "Brown Recluse" by Rosa Pineda - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brown_Recluse.jpg#/media/File:Brown_Recluse.jpg |
Here's what you need to know about the brown recluse
Taxonomy: The brown recluse is a spider in the genus Loxosceles. There are several other recluse spiders in this genus, but the one most likely to be in your basement is Loxosceles reclusa.
Description: The brown recluse is a medium-sized brown spider with long legs. One reliable characteristic is the violin-shaped marking on its back.
Lifestyle: This spider hangs out in dark corners of basements and garages, and prowls around by night in search of food and mates. For this reason, it sometimes winds up in contact with humans.
Is it venomous? Yes, extremely. The bite of the brown recluse isn't very painful at first, but gets worse and worse over days and weeks as the venom destroys cells. In very bad cases, large open wounds can form.
Damage to your house: None. In fact, they eat other pests. So going after the brown recluses in your house, which will kill other spiders as well, does have a downside.
What you can do: There are a number of ways to deal with spiders like this. The easiest option is to let them alone, since you'll probably never get bitten. But if you have a large outbreak, a good option is spider sticky traps
. You set them and forget them, and they attract and catch all kinds of spiders, including the brown recluse.
 |
| By Nicholas Ta (ta-graphy) (Wikimedia submission) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
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