uninvited guests part I

At the beginning of the semester, a student came into my office upset because his apartment has spiders.  His family found a spider in one of their beds, and it turned out to be a brown recluse.  After learning that they are poisonous, his wife wanted to pack their luggage and head back to their own country.  None of the other teachers seemed particularly concerned about the spiders, so despite the fact that I recalled seeing some really nasty pictures of what these spiders can do, I pushed any concern I had out of my mind.

And then, as the weather started getting cooler, I noticed more and more spiders in our apartment.  Most of what I’ve read about dealing with brown recluse spiders online has said that pesticides and exterminators don’t really do much, and so The Husband and I decided to try glue traps*, more vacuuming, and shaking out blankets, shoes, and clothing items before using them.  For as long as the spiders were out of sight, it was pretty easy to keep them out of mind.

One night, as I sat on the couch watching a movie and grading papers, I detected movement out of the corner of my eye.  A rather large spider was silk cabling itself from one of the air vents on our ceiling down to the ground.  Determined to catch and identify our uninvited guest, I grabbed the nearest glue trap and engaged the spider, trapping it and subjecting it to a photo shoot.

quarter-sized brown recluse spider

soon-to-be-dead spider models on a glue trap

* We bought two types of traps.  The Victor poison-free M293 seems to entice a lot more spiders than the Victor poison-free M256, and for each type of trap, it takes days, weeks, and even months to see any action.  Don’t expect results overnight.