The current social isolation has led people to take up gardening, make home improvements, do more cooking, etc. So naturally naturalist Linda Bower tried raising brown recluse spiders (BR). I had better let Linda explain.
"I have been living with a brown recluse infestation for 21 years. My house was built in the late 1800's, a perfect home full of cracks and crevices for their sheet-type webs and infamously reclusive lifestyle. July and August are the worst. They come out of the cracks when it is hot and dry. They are in my shower, laundry basket, closets, in every corner, behind my coffee maker, and yes, my bed. I hunt them at night with a vacuum cleaner and spotlight. In all that time I had never seen them kill. I just had to film them."
Linda raised one of the recluses, feeding it sawfly larvae (see this blog) which were attacking her silky dogwood. One spider killed three sawfly late instar larvae in quick succession. One of the larvae fought back, but a few quick strikes and it was dead. The second died quickly, too, but didn't fight it. The third is in this video where the spider kept jumping back rather than hang on, watching it ooze away. Spoiler alert - could spoil your dinner. The sawfly larva is harmless so why didn't it hang on for the kill?
One possibility is that it used all its venom on the first two larvae. Another possibility from Chris Barnhart is in a paper from 2008 in the Journal of Arachnology. The author raised and fed BR with prey of different sizes, both live, freshly killed or dead prey up to a month old. The study concluded that they preferred smaller prey that was fresh but will feed as scavengers when necessary.
"Overall, recluses preferred live prey over dead, but their choice was influenced by all three variables. Recluses were more likely to scavenge when presented with large live prey paired with dead prey of equal size than when presented with small live and dead prey. Spiders that had fed recently were more likely to scavenge. Finally, recluses preferred dead prey that were freshly killed or less than 24 hours old to items dead for longer periods." The Journal of Arachnology 36:140–144, 2008
Linda kept seven recluses in an aquarium, and being Linda, she had to go on to get this video of a recluse cannibalizing and of course pooping. She also captured it in this video cleaning its chelicera with the tiny fangs at the tip. These are so small that they can't penetrate any clothing.
Recluse fang - Linda Bower
Missouri is in the highest density region for brown recluses. That and more on identification is in this previous blog and in this Wikipedia entry.
Much more details on anatomy etc. is at Bugsinthenews.
