I have finished the Fire in the Night internship, but I'm going to be going to the Call in Nashville on 7/7/07, so I'm staying around IHOP-KC until then. I've moved in with some other IHOP folks just for about a week and a half, and until last night, I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in one of their rooms.

When I moved in, they told me that they had seen brown recluse spiders in the house; in fact, the person that was telling me this said he had killed five of them around his bed in one night. My initial reaction was a bit of unbelief and a bit of paranoia. All I knew about brown recluses was that they had a brown violin shape on their backs and were "deadly." (ranked with black widow spiders as the two spiders that were actually dangerous) So I checked my sheets carefully before I went to bed, and I did some research the next day.

The Wikipedia article indicated that brown recluses were frequently misidentified, actual brown recluse bites were rare, and the violin pattern on the back alone is not enough to identify a brown recluse. So I felt a little better, thinking that my housemates were probably mistaken.

And then, as I was about to go to bed last night, I accidentally pulled back the bottom sheet instead of the top sheet… and something started crawling away. At close inspection, it was a small spider. I caught it in a glass and examined it – violin shape, sure enough. Still not convinced though. Decided to check the rest of my sheets thoroughly, and there was a bigger (and faster) spider was under my pillow. Caught him in a jar and examined him as closely as I could. Looks like it might be a recluse. Checked some more pictures on the Internet.

http://spiders.ucr.edu/recluseid.html

Yep, I think that's the spider that was under my pillow. He had a dark abdomen, but apparently that depends on what he's eaten recently. All of the pictures of things that have been misidentified as recluses look nothing like what was in the house.

So anyway, I've done a little crash course on brown recluses over the past few days. Here are some good facts:

• Missouri is the heartland of brown recluse territory:
  

• When one recluse is found in a house, it's very likely that there are lots more (Rick Vetter reported one Kansas family that found 2000 of them in their house in 6 months).
  
• Recluse bites are actually quite rare. (The above-mentioned family never got any bites in 8 years, even though they were finding an average of 11 spiders per day…)
  
• Recluse bites, when they do occur, are nowhere near as serious as the mythology makes them out to be. Far from being deadly, 90% of them are not medically significant, and the only reported deaths have been in young children or the elderly.
  

As of last night, I'm sleeping on a futon (off the floor). I'm still going to check my sheets before I go to bed for the next week though!

Luke 10:19-20
19 "Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you. 20 Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven."