Female Brown Recluse?

[Ange]

hey, it's me from Indiana again. Sorry, to start a new thread, but I didn't know how to add additional pictures to the last one.
This girl was found on the back of a paneled door resting against a wall in my garage. An egg sac was behind what I would guess was a sheet web on a panel. There also where tons of little white exoskeletons on the door. Looked like miniatures of the 1st spider. This door was stored in my shed at my other house. I guess I brought them here with me.
The 1st picture is the alleged female brown recluse with the larger male I found in my living room. The second is her by herself. She is much smaller than the male... if it is indeed a brown recluse.

[Ange]

I am becoming a bit obsessive with these guys. You will be happy to know when my neighbors told me to be careful, they could kill my children. I responded by saying "There is NOT one reported death of an adult or CHILD by a brown recluse."

[Evspider2012]

Yep the left one is a legendary Loxosceles reclusa and the other one I don't know what it is. time for experts! :3

[Ange]

She does appear to have a fiddle on her, but for some reason it doesn't show as well in the pictures OR I am now seeing fiddles everywhere LOL. she is too tiny to see her eyes AND there were definitely Brown recluse exoskeletons all around. I would bet on that.

[Ungoliant]

The one on the left looks like a male brown recluse. (The palps are partially obscured but appear to have bulbs at the ends.)

The male spider on the right is not a recluse (or anything dangerous). It doesn't have the right coloration (the abdomen of a recluse is uniformly colored, not patterned), and I can't see the eyes. My educated (but non-expert) guess is that it's a male Steatoda.

Sorry, to start a new thread, but I didn't know how to add additional pictures to the last one.

The administrators prefer that you have a separate thread for each individual, even if it's the same species as one of your other spiders. That makes it easier for them to sort the pictures when they move posts that have been identified.

To add pictures to an existing thread, you can either edit your original post or post a reply. Either way, you need to click "Go Advanced" to access the file attachment tool.

[Ange]

oh they are both males? okay. the second spider is picture alone and then with the brown recluse for comparison if I wasn't clear. So I guess the egg sac was left behind and the dude was just hanging nearby? I thought spiders usually guarded their egg sac. I don't know too much about spiders in general but LOVE this sight and I am learning a lot.

[Ungoliant]

oh they are both males? okay. the second spider is picture alone and then with the brown recluse for comparison if I wasn't clear.

The brown recluse looks like a male, but I can't see the entire palps. The second spider (the one that I identified as Steatoda) is definitely male. You can tell because there are bulbs at the end of the palps.

I thought spiders usually guarded their egg sac. I don't know too much about spiders in general but LOVE this sight and I am learning a lot.

It depends on the spider. Some species abandon their egg sacs as soon as the eggs are laid. Others will guard the sacs. Some spider mothers even guard and/or feed their spiderlings for a while. I don't know a lot about the mothering behavior of brown recluses. These spiders do leave their webs at night to hunt, so it's possible that the mothers leave the egg sacs unguarded during that time.

And if you were wondering about those eggs: each sac contains about 50 eggs that take about a month to hatch. It takes about a year (depending on environmental conditions) for the spiderlings to reach adulthood. The adults may live for another 1-2 years.

[Ange]

I had the bug guy out today to get rid of some carpenter bees that were eating my back porch. I told him of the spiders and asked if he wanted to see them. His response "No, I know what they look like" He seemed a bit creeped out and I thought he would probably want to positively ID them for me or something. LOL he told me he could spray my house for the spiders. I said "no, just take care of the bees. Everything I read about spraying for them doesn't do any good. I will just keep the sticky traps out which hasn't caught any yet" I think the spray inside would probably do more harm to my dog and kids than the spiders.

[Ungoliant]

Good call on not spraying for spiders!

Exterminators are often not very good at identifying spiders. (It doesn't take much training or certification to become an exterminator, and very few have any significant training in spider identification.) Any honest, competent exterminator will tell you that spraying pesticides is not very effective against spiders.

[Mandy]

The second, smaller spider is a male Parasteatoda tepidariorum, which are incredibly common (their nickname in North America is ironically the "Common House Spider"). It's usually the bigger females that get seen more often, so it's possible you've seen one before. They're a lot different in color and size than the males are (more tan or light brown as opposed to reddish-orange). I attached a few of my photos of P. tepidariorum so you can see both genders (first 2 are males, middle image is both, last 2 are females):


Males of that species do have a sort of dark indentation on their carapace, so that's probably what is seeming like a fiddle shape. The whole thing with violin/fiddle shapes being diagnostic of a brown recluse is kind of a misnomer since so many totally unrelated, harmless spiders have the same (or similar) marking on their carapace. It's kind of a 'whole package' deal: the spider has to have all the other brown recluse features as well as the violin marking in order to be a genuine brown recluse. A violin marking by itself isn't diagnostic.

I agree that the brown recluse is a male, too. Couldn't say much about the egg sac you found without seeing a photo of it, though. It's possible it's not a brown recluse egg sac, who knows. Also, the shed skins of brown recluses have straight, practically rigid, splayed out legs (so you can watch for them since that's a unique trait). The only example online I could find of that was this tiny image: http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/ent...cluseskins.jpg. The leg portions of shed skins from other spiders are never (or very rarely) as splayed out as that.