[HN Gopher] How to identify and misidentify a brown recluse spid... ___________________________________________________________________ How to identify and misidentify a brown recluse spider (2005) Author : vector_spaces Score : 86 points Date : 2022-08-19 07:05 UTC (15 hours ago) (HTM) web link (spiders.ucr.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (spiders.ucr.edu) | throwanem wrote: | If you _see_ it, it 's almost certainly not a recluse. They | weren't given that name for nothing, after all. | libele wrote: | NOT RECLUSE Numerous Occurrence | Timing Red center Elevated Chronic | Large Ulcerates too early Swelling | Exudative | | https://spiders.ucr.edu/what-not-recluse-bite | | https://entomology.ucr.edu/news/2017/02/15/no-thats-not-brow... | mithr wrote: | I mostly find myself thankful that this site does not support | embedded images. Makes it one of the only places an arachnophobe | like myself can calmly click into a discussion thread with a | title like this! | bombcar wrote: | I feel this page would be much more amusing if it just continued | forever and got more and more absurd identifications of "possible | brown recluse" as you went down. | | Things like https://www.oldbug.com/brownbeauty.htm and so forth. | LordDragonfang wrote: | The /r/spiders subreddit likes to meme on all the people asking | for things that are clearly not recluses, you can find some | entertaining ones by using the search: (obvious cw for spiders) | | https://old.reddit.com/r/spiders/search?q=recluse&restrict_s... | | and an ID chart: https://i.redd.it/avet69mnjga31.jpg | | And slightly off topic, but I love the "/r/geology rock | identification guide": https://i.imgur.com/Asnut.png | leephillips wrote: | The "semaphores" are my favorite detail (and the lovely split | back window). We should bring those back! | havblue wrote: | >got more and more absurd identifications of "possible brown | recluse" as you went down. | | "If the spider has brown fur but weighs about sixty pounds, has | a wagging tail and is licking you with its tongue, you might | actually have discovered a labradoodle..." | sdwr wrote: | That would be in poor taste! These spiders are dangerous, | identification is potentially life-saving. Not a great place to | mix in humorous misinformation. | bitwize wrote: | Holy crap, that's the web as it's meant to be. | | I checked out the rest of the site, too, they look dead | serious. | | And they still have an @earthlink.net email address! | willhinsa wrote: | Just make sure to include https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html ! | mechanical_bear wrote: | Nice car, but wow...70k for a bug, even a nice one with docs | etc, seems steep. | bitwize wrote: | But it has crotch coolers! And it's a perfect chestnut brown! | leephillips wrote: | I was surprised at the low price for what seems like a | desirable collector's item, but I know nothing about the car | collector market. | bombcar wrote: | It looks like a rare type, along with perfect condition and | original matching, so it all lines up - and that price is a | "we'll sell when we want to" price. | progre wrote: | Replacement coil... Tell him he's dreaming. | gridder wrote: | It's brown, yes, but it's not a spyder. Bummer | KerrAvon wrote: | Beetle prices have risen, though, even pre-pandemic. | | https://bringatrailer.com/volkswagen/beetle/ | | If this is a true split-window, it's the most rare mass- | produced bug. I'm not sure I'd pay more than 50K for it, but | it's definitely a rare specimen. | pessimizer wrote: | In my second-hand experience, the best way to identify them is a | couple of days after the fact, when a circle of skin starts to | turn brown and mushy. | | I don't know what "extremely rare" means (especially in Arkansas, | where a brown recluse seems about as likely as any other spider), | but I had a girlfriend and a best friend get bites the same year | that got very ugly, especially since the girlfriend's bite was on | her neck and was misdiagnosed the first time she saw someone for | it. | bachmeier wrote: | https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/772295-overview#a6 | | "The 2019 Annual Report of the American Association of Poison | Control Centers recorded 790 individual exposures to brown | recluse spiders, with 174 moderate outcomes, 24 major outcomes, | and 0 dealths." | | > the best way to identify them is a couple of days after the | fact, when a circle of skin starts to turn brown and mushy | | That sounds like a really bad way to identify them. I'd much | prefer to identify them at a distance. (You may have been | referring to understanding an existing bite, but that's | different from the article.) | tiagod wrote: | > That sounds like a really bad way to identify them. I'd | much prefer to identify them at a distance. (You may have | been referring to understanding an existing bite, but that's | different from the article.) | | I'm pretty sure they were joking | javajosh wrote: | This would make an actually interesting (and potentially useful) | captcha system. "Pick the spiders without spines"..."pick the | spiders that are only one color"...etc. Call it either "creepy | captcha" or "creature captcha". | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: | This is already a thing. Just yesterday I had to solve a | captcha picking only horses with white legs. | dreamcompiler wrote: | Saw the headline and thought "oh here we go with the myths." I'm | a spider and rattlesnake wrangler in my spare time and almost | everything I know about spiders comes from one of the premier | arachnologists in the US: Rick Vetter. | | And this is his site! So no myths here; just good science. | resoluteteeth wrote: | When I occasionally want to identify a spider I see I find it a | bit sad that you can find lots of pages with information on | spiders that people are afraid of but not much information on | random spiders unless they're something particularly interesting | like orb weavers | | I'm not sure if there are just too many species or if just nobody | cares? | VTimofeenko wrote: | Well we as a species are probably more interested in whether | it's really a tiger in the bushes that's out to get us and not | in that tiger's family tree. | filoeleven wrote: | There are some variously-imperfect methods to ID things that | you can take photos of. | | The Seek app by iNaturalist has pretty decent AI to identify | plants and animals. It can limit itself to broader IDs such as | "wasp family" if it doesn't find enough characteristics. It can | also be wildly off sometimes in its specific IDs because it's | image recognition. | | There are also loads of dedicated Facebook groups specifically | for ID. I know that some of the plant and mushroom ones are | very good, I suspect spider-focused groups are similarly | enthusiastic. They can also be wildly off, with the added | component of traded insults between different people who are | all certain they are each correct, and the others are all | idiots "who wouldn't know a recluse from a redback even after | they got bit." This could be a pro or a con, depending on what | you find entertaining. | | State extensions are going to be the most reliable, and will | likely have the most info on the obscure local wildlife. I | don't know how willing they are to ID from photos though; it | may vary from place to place. They may want you to capture one | and send it in. | pvaldes wrote: | First, count its eyes and then look for eyes arranged in an V | pattern | | If you see a couple of eyes much bigger than the rest, is not a | recluse. | | If you count 8 eyes, is not a recluse | | If the eyes are arranged in a rectangle or trapezoid, not | recluse. | | If you see single eyes isolated, not recluse | | This list will discard the 95% of the suspicious spiders that you | can find at home | | Otherwise: can be, but not necessarily, a brown recluse. | nerdponx wrote: | The problem I have is that, no, the spiders in my bathroom do | not have any of these features. I don't know what kind of | Loxosceles they are, but I am pretty sure they are some kind of | Loxosceles. I do put them outside whenever I see them because | they make me nervous, but they also seem to be generally | uninterested in biting me. | | On the other hand, my house also seems to be home to a thriving | Scutigera population. They eat spiders, right? | kdkfkfkdl wrote: | Nah step one is to look for the disqualifying features that are | easy to see from a distance: striped legs, spines, conspicuous | web, multicolored abdomen | | Step two is to run away if it's still not disqualified because | even with the helpful photos I couldn't figure out where its | eyes are and I'm not getting that close to an actual spider, | ridiculous | pvaldes wrote: | Just use a good quality camera from a safe distance and then | the Gimp to open the photo and cut the interesting zone. | pvaldes wrote: | Well, or simply use this great and very informative web... | I'm overthinking again. Is all in the web :-) | [deleted] | kizer wrote: | Brown recluse! | [deleted] | xipho wrote: | @recluseornot on Twitter was run by some very good entomologists | I know. They had to stop because of the workload. What someone | needs to do, perhaps, is to use that corpa of images and | responses as the start of the all-powerful AI. | | Better yet, have a startup fund a real-life entomologist for 2-5 | years, remote is possible, to _keep_ identifying pictures in this | type of forum, in return for that relatively paltry sum (maybe | 70k /year + 10k for scope + camera setup for more detailed work, | + 15k for operating a year), you'd get a far richer dateset to | "commercialize". | | Yes, I know spiders are not insects, I'm an entomologist too. | iancmceachern wrote: | I'm down, let's do it. | reportingsjr wrote: | > What someone needs to do, perhaps, is to use that corpa of | images and responses as the start of the all-powerful AI. | | This already exists and is pretty good at what it does. It's | called iNaturalist. It attempts to identify all living things | and in my experience gets about 80% there. Experts will also | occasionally come along and more accurately ID things. | | On top of this, the submitted data is used for scientific | research which is amazing! | garren wrote: | It looks like they're still active as of 20min ago [0]. Super | handy account. Just scrolling through the pics gives you a much | better sense for identifying them. I suspect I've seen one or | two in my yard, but now I think I have a better idea of what to | look for. | | [0] https://twitter.com/RecluseOrNot/status/1560235560324710402 | xipho wrote: | Great! I know there was a hiatus at one point. It's | definitely a cool feed. I worked with one of the OPs there, | might have to send him a PM to see what's up. | | Twitter via scientists can be nice. There are a good number | of people who adhere to "just the science" and post | interesting/beautiful things from their labs/work. | quechimba wrote: | I got a few spider bites in the Peruvian Amazon. The spiders look | exactly like those recluse spiders on the photos. They are really | fast and they can jump. The photos I found online of what recluse | spider bites look like matched my wound that refused to heal for | 2 months until I started taking antibiotics... Now they look like | a small bruise. | Yizahi wrote: | Ugh, the article was so hard to understand, I actually had to | read certain parts twice to get if he was talking what is a | recluse or what isn't in that line or paragraph. I think it is a | bad idea to interleave those definitions, and same with pictures. | I have no objections about hard to understand objects, but this | was probably intended as a quick emergency guide for a commoners. | xipho wrote: | Completely agreed. This is a common type of page associated | with extension units. They are written by, and for those who | are doing pest-control style work, for example. There is _much_ | room for improvement, including better diagnostic tools, clear | choice-based keys, etc. There are actually very few people who | can accurate diagnose these critters down to species, let alone | "recluse". Those people depend on tools (6 eyes are very | small), morphological knowledge, etc. There is a real need for | new, purpose-built page whose content is provided for specific | reasons (this is here to answer question X to audience Y via | information I, if you use it for other things YRMV). Getting | scientists to understand these needs is tough, they are almost | always talking to other scientists, which is completly fine and | necessary, but branching out is hard. A classic UI/UX problem. | bombcar wrote: | This clearly needs a SaaS startup (spiders as a service) and | we can certainly use some blockchain somehow. | | I'm targeting $100m investments by Dec, with an IPO or ICO in | early May at a $1b+ valuation. | xipho wrote: | And by blockchain you mean its true evolution, which is | totally and completely not a blockchain/nft/loot box, at | all, really, the "silken highway". Once you touch it, | you're stuck, vibrations you give off as you struggle to | unsubscribe transmit to all suckers^d others, also alerting | the central spider-mother (from which the highway grows, | may she never falter) who grows the inescapable network of | sticky threads via a 5% take of your offering through her | bit-rotting venom. | rcurry wrote: | This idea has legs. | echelon wrote: | Seems like we need an ML model for this. | | isthisabrownrecluse.com or something | CoastalCoder wrote: | Now I'm concerned that someone will use this with DALL-E to | generate an endless supply of nightmare fuel. | schroeding wrote: | It can already create pictures of spiders that trigger at | least my arachnophobia alright: https://imgur.com/a/rptW29G | [1] | | [1] "A real photo of a horrible, anxiety-inducing scary real | spider that can kill humans, 55mm lens" | dylan604 wrote: | you mean thisbrownreclusedoesnotexist.com | | or it would probably work well with notahotdog | xipho wrote: | The ML model is an entomologists/arachnologist trained for 5+ | years, if not decades. Start training with data from | iNaturalist, but then realize they are already using AI | detection models, and they note they are far from accurate, and | they don't anticipate them ever being accurate. | | Part of the problem is you need scopes/cameras with resolution | for things under 2mm. People don't have those, nor the | expertise to setup the light, etc. to take the pictures | required to diagnose them. Then they need precise angles to | take the shots at, etc. | | Not impossible, and could certainly eliminate a whole suite of | things that are not, but at the end of the day you're going to | need a salaried person to make the final call if you want to | commercialize this and not get sued... I suspect. | UIUC_06 wrote: | (this is about black widows, not brown recluses, so it may or may | not be relevant) | | I had someone tell me if I went out at night with a UV pen and | shined it underneath stuff, esp. patio furniture, I'd find lots | of black widows. | | Tried it; didn't see any. | eth0up wrote: | I used to find black widows frequently near a melaleuca tree | which was near my side door, in south Florida. Day and night. | Not infrequently in the house. They always seemed passive, but | I still ushered them outdoors. | | I have yet to identify a recluse with any confidence, although | a friend of a friend lost his arm after one crawled upward from | his hand to shoulder, biting repeatedly as it moved. I think | delayed treatment was the ultimate cause of severity. | tfandango wrote: | I don't know about that, but they love wood. I find them from | time to time in the corners of my fence. Only about one a year. | Once I found thousands when the eggs hatched but they quickly | dispersed. An interesting thing about Black Widows is that | their webs are really strong and unorganized, so I usually see | that before finding the spider, which is pretty shy. | OkayPhysicist wrote: | Yeah, their webs are pretty distinctive. Besides wood piles, | I've found them in brick piles and folded up shade umbrellas | a lot. They seem to enjoy materials that can hold moisture | without quite reaching the levels of "damp". | | Biggest I ever saw was in an umbrella while I was de- | winterizing the pool that I worked summers at. Was | absentmindedly going down the rows, opening up umbrellas when | I happened to look up and shrieked. Thing's abdomen had to be | at least an inch, maybe an inch and a half. The pool manager | (70 yo CA native, so seen his fair share) thought I was | exaggerating until he walked over and said it was the biggest | he'd ever seen, too. | jorts wrote: | Black widows are pretty easy to find based on their webs. | They're really messy looking. | throwaway675309 wrote: | I would argue that if you're close enough to the point where you | can accurately count the number of eyes, you've already made a | terrible mistake. | choeger wrote: | Here's the thing: If I am in a country that harbours these | abominations of nature and I see a suspicious spider near or even | inside my home, I'll kill it. I'll drop the whole weight of the | "sapiens" part of my species on that toxic creature. No quarter | given or expected. | | There's something very deep inside me that tells me that beings | with way more than the usual amount of legs are to be feared and | I trust that part of me. | rintakumpu wrote: | The absolute tolerable maximum of legs is six. Two or four is | preferred. | solarmist wrote: | Just recently, there was a super interesting reddit thread about | a brown recluse bite and the healing process. | | https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wqawcb/m... | ezekg wrote: | I recently killed a brown recluse that snuggled up in one my | daughter's shoes in the back of her closet. | | Seeing that makes me want to go check her other shoes lol. | giardini wrote: | Tell your daughter what you found and she'll do the checking! | ezekg wrote: | She's 3, so she oscillates between "I wanna squish it!" to | "AHHHHHH kill it now!!!!" depending on the day. :) | aftbit wrote: | > You won't be able to tell what it is (and please don't send | them to me for identification because due to shift in the | California economy, I no longer provide these services) but you | will at least know that it is not a recluse spider. | | I wonder what the author is referring to. | pvaldes wrote: | taxonomy and their best friend poverty, probably | ceeplusplus wrote: | Could also be AB5 restricting how independent operators are | allowed to contract out their services. It's been a big fuss | in the trucking industry. | ben_w wrote: | Probably not. | | The page says it was updated January 2005; the only things | I know about AB5 are from Wikipedia, which says signed into | law 2019-09-18? | syntaxing wrote: | I find it interesting how the recluse map is pointing to a | wayback archive rather than a direct host through their site. | bergenty wrote: | I live in a place with brown recluses and have been trying to | find one for more than three years with no luck. It's really | living up to its name. | dreamcompiler wrote: | It's fairly common for a family in recluse country to discover | a nest of hundreds of them behind the headboard of their bed | that has been there for years, and yet nobody ever got bitten. | blakewatson wrote: | Excuse me while I try to unread this. | voidfunc wrote: | This is fucking nightmare fuel. I'd burn the house down and | I'm not even particularly bothered by spiders usually | choeger wrote: | I'd raze the whole town. | gennarro wrote: | Check map. I'm good. Instantly close article. No thanks on | anything spiders. | flobosg wrote: | As someone who had to identify Chilean recluses ( _Loxosceles | laeta_ , arguably the most dangerous one), I think that lack of | spines and walking speed (they can be quite fast) are the most | frequent criteria I've used to check them. | elmer007 wrote: | When advice regarding a spider is along the lines of "don't look | at it from above, get down and gaze into its eyes," that's when I | draw the line. | | It can't bite me if it's flat. | Cupertino95014 wrote: | Wasn't it _Animal Farm_ where the animals say "Four legs good; | eight legs bad" ? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-19 23:00 UTC)