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Comments & ID Thoughts
Not the best photo. Rather small spider. Almost resembled a Brown Recluse, but seemed too small. Any assistance would be appreciated.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Dec 30, 2023
- Photographed: Dec 30, 2023
- Spider: Unidentified
- Location: New Jersey, United States
- Spotted Indoors: Other
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes:
The spider is on a package a cheese slices for a size reference.
Hello fellow New Jersian! Fear not, as we do not have brown recluse in New Jersey – and even if you were to run into a brown recluse somehow by complete chance of it being a stowaway or out-of-state transplant, they are nowhere near as dangerous as the media has set them out to be. This is most likely a broad faced sac spider, trachelas tranquilis. They are not medically significant to people. They are very common in NJ indoors between the fall and winter – I always see at least one or two in my house every season. Like… Read more »
Well put.
I did an image search on Google with the photo and it came up as a brown recluse. I decided to zoom in some more and sharpen the image some. It came up as a common house spider after that. Great response and very well described. I do get plenty of Black Widow’s, outside thankfully, but I have yet to ever see a Brown Recluse. Thank you for the response and reassurance that I do not have swarms of Brown Recluse Spiders running around my house!
Beware of Google Lens, the reverse image search. It is terrible at anything that includes a species’ range. It doesn’t account for where you are or where the images it scrapes were photographed. iNaturalist does know your location and works with a set catalog of reference images instead of the World Wide Web. Google is getting better at image recognition, it works well for insects and plants, but again the range of the species in the answer needs to be checked. At first it told almost everyone that any spider was a Brown Recluse, and that was really annoying! Yes… Read more »