Spider Hunters

On this blog I have related some of Matt and my adventures with bugs -- specifically the great roach battle of May 2007. (Still, nothing can top our katydid caper in NYC.) Well, last night we the spider fake-out of August 2007.

It started when I was getting ready for bed, spotted a giant orange spider on the wall and screamed, "Matt, come in here now!" We've had enough encounters with bugs for him to know what this was about. "Wow," he said as he came in. "That's quite beautiful, isn't it?" I agreed that it was lovely indeed as I ran out of the room and downstairs to retrieve our official bug-catching container, an old plastic pasta sauce jar we keep under the sink.

Our game plan was that Matt would try to capture the spider, but if he missed and the spider bolted -- the thing was fast and agile -- I'd smash it with a shoe (which, for the record I really did not want to do!) While I was still looking for a hefty-soled weapon, Matt got the container around the spider against the wall. It was pretty easy to knock it into the container and seal the lid. We were about to release it outside when I suggested we look it up online. It's such an unusual bright spider -- maybe we could find out what it was.

After a lot of searching we started to suspect we'd caught a brown widow, which has deadly venom. We looked at each other wide-eyed. Could it be? No. Maybe. It kinda looks like it. Hmmmmm.

During our search, we stumbled onto a project at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in which they ask regular citizens to capture spiders and send them in for study. To preserve the spider, the web site suggests sticking it in the freezer for 15 minutes to kill it, then soaking it in rubbing alcohol. Together, Matt and I carried our specimen to the fridge. After what I swore was way less than 15 mins, Matt said it was surely dead and we should transfer him to a smaller container. Indeed, the poor little guy seemed utterly frozen. We slipped him into a smaller Tupperware container and debated picking him up to get a better look at the possible brown widow markings on his belly. But I was jittery and wanted the spider under a sealed lid again.

I poured the alcohol into the small container and Matt said, "Oh he didn't like that," which I thought was odd because the spider was dead. Then all of a sudden, with amazing force, it started to swim -- hard! It was like Glenn Close coming alive in the bathtub at the end of "Fatal Attraction." Like a great naturalist, I screamed and ran out of the kitchen. Matt slammed a lid over it -- and we both had to catch our breath for a minute afterward.

We haven't done it yet, but we're going to bring our spider specimen to the museum, and someone will eventually get back to us and tell us what type of spider it really is -- a deadly venomous brown widow, a common garden spider or something else all together.