If you live in an area of the world where brown recluse spiders are common, there’s a very good chance that you’ve found a few in your house.

As scary as the effects of their bite can be, the truth is that these spiders largely keep to themselves in dark, damp area of your home. If they interact with or bite humans, it’s usually an accidental meeting that leaves them feeling as if they need to defend themselves.

If you don’t believe me, just ask this Kansas family, who had over 2,000 venomous roommates for a few years and are no worse for the wear.

There are a few reasons, according to a state Department of Health, that brown recluse spiders are difficult to get rid of once they are in your house.

“They are long lived, can survive for many months without feeding, and females need mate only once to produce offspring throughout their lives. So it takes only one mated female to start an infestation. Once established, they are difficult to control.”

Brown recluse spiders don’t spin webs in a traditional sense, instead matting silk in a hidden location and then darting out to ambush its prey.

The Kansas family in question included parents and two children, and they moved into the 19th-century home in 1996. They often spotted spiders moving around, but it took them around 5 years to wonder whether or not they might be brown recluses.

It turned out they were, according to a team of scientists who invaded the house to learn about the spiders – and to help get rid of them.

Two team members collected the spiders nightly over a four-month period, and ended up with a whole pile of the eight-legged arachnids.

“2,055 brown recluse spiders were collected or killed in 6 months, 842 from sticky traps and 1,213 from manual sampling. Of the 1,179 manually collected brown recluse spiders sorted into size categories, there were 323 large, 255 medium, and 601 small spiders.”

That is a lot of spiders to live with, even if they aren’t venomous.

The medium and large spiders would all have been capable of injecting venom with their bites, so around 488 of the collected spiders would be considered potential threats to their human roommates.

That said, researchers confirm that in the five years before the family took action, none of them were bitten by a venomous specimen.

“Despite a conservative estimate of 400 envenomation-capable brown recluses in the Kansas home, no envenomations of the occupants occurred.”

The researchers believe it’s possible that some bites could have been misdiagnosed by doctors who are unfamiliar with the symptoms and appearance of a venomous brown recluse bite. The spiders are most active at night, with many bites happening by accident during sleep, so the person may not be aware of what caused the itchy bite on their leg.

Even so, researchers clarify that despite being venomous to humans, the brown recluse bite is not often as significant as the lore would have you believe.

“When they do occur, bites are rarely as serious as they have been portrayed. Some bites produce only localized redness and swelling. Severe necrosis probably occurs in less than 10 percent of cases, and may result more from bacterial infection of the wound rather than reaction to the spider’s venom.”

I’m not sure I would want to live in a house that attracted scientific researchers.

That said, I don’t mind keeping most spiders around – they’re better than the flies, that’s for sure.

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