Big ole spider

5/22/07 One of my young daughters happen to spot this huge spider last night in our garage. I did not think much about it to bother to look. At the time I thought she meant it was a size of a quarter. After about five minutes of tinkering around with what ever I was doing, I decided to step into our garage to get something & I decided to look down where she saw the spider run to. WOW! To my astonishment she wasn't joking when she said the spider was huge! It was at least 3 inches in diameter! My daughter ran into the house to get my husband to see it. He decided we should capture the critter to get a closer look. We grab one of our kid's net catcher & their little bug aquarium. We tried to scoop it up but the little guy was a real spiderman! It jumped & scurried until it decided to climb the wall. That is when we threw the net around & over. This wasn't easy since it tried its very best to escape through any slight opening. I guess James was in a hurry to capture the little fellow. I mean we were all screaming like a bunch of dumbasses. Then I told him to take his time and to do what the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin would do...to be patient and to be calculating about how we are to catch this spider. I found a flat aluminum sign and slid it between the wall and the netting entrapping the spider. We then transferred it to the bug aquarium.

We were really concern about the kind of spider we had. We were wondering if we had a brown recluse or a baby turantula? It was really fiesty and didn't want to be trapped. We went online and Googled our mystery spider. We found out that its a female wolf spider. It is somewhat related to the turantula, however it slightly resembles a brown recluse. We read that many people mistaken wolf spiders for brown recluses. To tell a wolf spider a part from a recluse is that a wolf spider tends to be a bit robust looking, it also has 8 eyes instead of 6. Its back has stripes that make the wolf spider appear to have ribs. Its tail part has a black splotchy dot. Wolf spiders are not boring looking spiders compare to brown recluses. Recluses are very plain with the exception of this dark violin or fiddle shape on its back, which is located about where its eyes would be. Anyway, here is the picture my oldest daughter took when we let it go away from our house. BTW, wolf spiders can bite but are not dangerous. They are actually very intriguing, especially where their eyes are set at. They are predatory of course and they have these prominent biddy black eyes on their heads. The wolf spider we were looking at was obviously looking at us too. She had a lot of character and after finding out what kind of spider she was, she appeared very friendly afterwards and we no longer feared her.