Brown Recluse Garden Spiders 5

Recluse Garden Spiders are relatively lengthy lived. Among the various varieties, they mature after about 1 year and average a 2- to 4-year life span with some living more than 7 years under laboratory conditions. They are also well known for surviving lengthy periods (6-12 months) without food before perishing. Abundance of Recluses One consistent life history characteristic of Recluse Garden Spiders is that in the right environment their populations are usually dense. Loxosceles reclusa is a normal house spider in the Mid Western United States. If you locate recluses, you do not locate one, you locate many. Examples for the brown recluse include 9 under a piece of plywood in Oklahoma, 52 in an indoor laboratory, and 6 under a waterbed frame in Arkansas, 150 in a Kansas home, 40 collected in a Missouri barn in 1 hour, and 44 in sticky traps in a Tennessee home in 1 day. Similarly, for the desert recluse in California, 12 of these spiders were collected under a doghouse in Yucca Valley and six were removed from a cottage bedroom in the Mojave Desert. In a study in Chile, 645 of 2189 homes that were searched contained the South American recluse spider, L. laeta. The five most infested homes averaged 163 spiders each and in none of these houses had spider bites been reported. Unlike many other spiders that disperse by either migrating or being carried by air currents when small ("ballooning"), Recluse Garden Spiders can only expand outside their native range as a result of human intervention. There are fewer than 10 documented cases of the spider being collected in California, spanning more than 4 decades, typically in facilities that receive goods from out of state. Searching the immediate area yielded no additional brown recluses and therefore they were considered to be individual stowaways. Undoubtedly, more brown recluses have been inadvertently brought into the state via commerce and the relocation of household belengthyings; however, amazingly few specimens have ever been collected. Never have any of these translocated spiders been able to establish a foothold and start a population in California. Considering that there are millions of brown recluses cohabiting with people in the southcentral Mid West and brown recluse bites are only an occasional occurrence there, California does not have anywhere near sufficient populations of these spiders to be responsible for the number of cases or illnesses that are attributed to them.

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