Hobo Spider Bites

Posted on August 25, 2009
Filed Under General | 6 Comments

Hobo SpiderHere is the mug shot of my blog post subject today. Its called the Hobo Spider aka the aggressive house spider and for good reason. My recent encounter with this infectious parasite makes me wish it was on the endangered species list. The bite a full 50% of the time is not toxic, go figure the odds were not in my favor since both times they bit me, both were venomous.

How ugly can these bites really be? Well let me give you just a brief idea and you decide for yourself. I had originally written this post as a quickie, no great detail and no effort to highlight anything in particular. Two days after this original post I was told that if the infection and swelling in my foot did not recede in a few days that they would amputate my toe where one of the bites were. I had originally thought that the bite, although painful, was actually in check and not advancing at all. Therein lies the deception with these types of spiders. You think its just a little red mark that itches, some mild infection and swelling and it reduces and you think its nothing. Then the destruction of all the flesh around the bite starts to take place and you end up with a hole that gets bigger and bigger until it gets to be alarming. This is no misquito bite or mild bee sting, this is much worse.

The Hobo Spider is rather infamous for this kind of destruction. Even the feared Recluse spider has nothing on this devil in terms of reputation. There are even sites dedicated to it beginning with the HoboSpider.org and many CDC related sites at universities where they study the effects and health issues surrounding the bite.

I’ve done a fair bit of research about this arachnid and discovered that the bite is as deadly as the Brown Recluse, more random, more frequent, and most often between the month of August until the first freeze. In my house I managed to kill one every single night for the past two weeks. As I’ve read, they hunt at night and have poor vision adding to their aggressive behavior and chance encounters with sleeping victims. They say that they are attracted to sound and movement. So, I decided to locate one and test the idea that sound attracts them, so a few feet from the spider made a little noise with a spoon to see if it would come running. No such luck, it actually scared it away. Apparently its stealth they prefer.

One interesting fact I found was that even though only 50% of their bites are venomous, they still account for a full 75% of all hospital visits for stings, bites and injuries caused by bugs during the same seasonal time period. It has also been suggested that spraying for them may not be good because the hobo spider unlike others is rather resilient and durable and can survive many things that kill other spiders and insects. By spraying you tend to exterminate its primary enemy and natural predator the giant house spider.

Anyway, enough of the post revision to correct a few things and detail about the effects of this guys bite, time to get caught up from 4 days of not working. Remember, my nemesis is your nemesis and every chance you have to kill one, do it, you are doing the world a favor.

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