I am not a big fan of spiders, I was talking with my friend today about creatures that decided to come into our houses. If you live in Mid-to-Southwestern Ohio everyone you talk to will have stories of these giant, hairy, tarantula-shaped black spiders that like to go into basements and barns and sit on back steps and they carry their babies on their backs so when you stomp them the little ones go running.
Everyone calls them wolf spiders, but the wolf spiders in Ohio don’t look like them. They not only aren’t shaped the same, but they’re not anywhere near as hairy, they don’t get as big, and they aren’t pitch black like these mystery tarantulas.
One of the places I worked at in high school had them everywhere, and they were as big as some of the little dogs we groomed. I will say it did help me be less afraid of small spiders cause, it wasn’t as big as that thing creeping across the groom room floor. But then one of the places I lived at afterwords also had them and kind of traumatized from finding one in my bedroom once.
Still, I’ve googled every kind of way I can think of, I’ve looked at lists of spiders native to Ohio, and I can’t find anything about these tarantula look-alikes. Everything just says tarantulas aren’t native there so it’s not that, must be a wolf spider or a fishing spider. But neither of them look anything like these guys. I’ve never run into one as an adult with a smartphone, so it’s been frustrating to have to try to describe something to a search engine.
I got home from my friends to see a cool bug in my garden, and, with that conversation fresh in my mind, figured I would pose this question to inaturalist.
This sounds like a description of the Carolina Wolf Spider. It is the largest wolf spider in North America, and it carries its babies on its back. Because you’re not a big fan of spiders, and because you were a bit younger and maybe smaller the last time you saw it, it may have seemed slightly more gigantic than it actually is.
Hopefully that helps, @kicadacat! Almost certainly a wolf spider of the genus Hogna or Tigrosa.
As a naturalist, and especially if you use social media, you will be familiar with the human tendency to exaggerate and catastrophize. Most people are not iNatters, and there is a dearth of ecological literacy as we become more and more disconnected from nature.
Here in Calgary, we do occasionally get mountain lions coming into the city, but it’s rare, while bobcats are common. We frequently see well-meaning warnings that someone spotted a “mountain lion”, so everybody watch out! (it was usually a bobcat, which is much smaller.) Unfortunately, this also happens with other taxa: every snake is a deadly viper, everything vaguely bee-like is a wasp, so kill it with fire, etc. Most people don’t have your enthusiasm and curiosity for solving spider mysteries!
@AdamWargon@kanescompendium I don’t know how else to describe it but the wolf spiders just look too pointy for the mystery spider. Mystery Spider is shaped much rounder and holds its legs more rounder. They’re also not hairy enough. My friend today said she’s convinced they are just Ohio Valley Mutants because she’s also looked them up and said the same thing, that wolf spiders just don’t look the same. And they are definitely as big as an average sized hand, the place where I saw them in my bedroom I was an adult, I just didn’t have a smartphone because they didn’t exist yet. (I’m old lol.)
There are bobcats here, too, and they can look much bigger than you expect, so I’m not surprised! We’ve also seen mountain lions here, though a very few times and many, many, many years apart, and most people just try to convince themselves it was a bobcat with a tail!
Let’s put the baby thing to the side for a moment. I can remember mixing up memories of animals as a child (which is normal behavior, there are articles about it), I still fully believe I once found an alien population of garter snakes as a five year old, but it was probably just me mixing up native grass snakes and a visit to the reptile zoo around here (I’m European, no garter snakes here).
There are some very black mygalomorphs living in Ohio, for example Ummidia audouini, which is quite big. Could it be something like this? They have quite short legs and hold them differently. The adult males often walk around and fall in pools, cellars etc.
You found it! That’s it!!! I had no idea we had trap door spiders in Ohio! You are right, my friend said she would find them in her pool growing up. I was also coming to the conclusion that there might be two spiders being conflated; I personally never saw them carry babies on their backs, but other people had said that, and knowing some spiders do, had no reason to doubt them.
@myrmepropagandist The body was more fat and round and the legs were held differently, yes. The trapdoor spider that tobiasbauer suggested looks just like it, so I’m willing to bet that it was that!
@Vireya I have not come across one as a smartphone-carrying adult lol, or I would!
@dendroleon I personally never saw them carrying the babies on the back, so I’m thinking that the people who did see giant spiders with babies on their backs were seeing real wolf spiders, and just conflating them because “big dark spider”. and of course if you say “I saw a giant black spider but I don’t know what it was” everyone is going to tell you about their giant black spiders. The trapdoor spider that tobiasbauer suggested definitely looks like it!
Thank you everyone, now I’m going to make a point to try to find one that isn’t in the groom room or a basement and get an observation of it!
So happy we could solve this. Yes, trapdoor spiders (or mygalomorphs in general) are nearly everywhere in the US and some go even up to Canada. The iNat-Dataset is very interesting and should be the fundation for a publication, as it clearly shows the climatic limitations (winter temperature! Cf with other maps) within the US:
I didn’t, wow that really looks like a mini tarantula! Also this photo actually makes them look kind of scary! I guess I haven’t looked at many mygalomorph photos before, I can’t think of any photos I’ve seen before of spiders that show their fangs.
Sphodros have especially large fangs, and the ‘scary’ factor of mygalomorphs may be amplified by the orientation of the fang. in mygals, the fang is parallel to the base, and these spiders tend to have to ‘rear up’ to attack prey. the araneomorphs’ fangs are turned inward, and rather than having to rear up they spread their chelicerae wide and use more like a pinching movement
Sphodros (& the rest of family Atypidae) has a unique hunting method. like most other mygals they live in a silk-lined burrow, but atypids extend the silken tube up above the surface. many species attach this tube to the base of a tree, rock wall, fencepost, in the grass, etc.
the spider stays in the burrow, beneath the aerial tube. when something crawls across the web (which the spider has added bits of debris to, making it more cryptic), the spider crawls up the tube and attacks from inside the tube. she holds the prey item with one fang, cuts a tear in the web with the other, pulls the prey in and eats it down in the burrow. when she’s done, she’ll throw the remains out of the top of the tube and patch up the hole she made.
from what i’ve read, S. niger does not affix its purseweb to a vertical structure, but lays it horizontal under leaf litter. I’ve never seen one of those, but I see S. rufipes (and/or S. atlanticus, S. coylei) webs all the dang time around here (northern Virginia)
The craziest North American mygalomorphs for me are Cyclocosmia. One of the most mysterious is Cyclocosmia torreya from Florida, which was described by WJ Gertsch & Norman Platnick together, maybe the two most prominent historic characters in US Arachnology. If you’re from Florida: Every record of them is very valuable, as nothing is really known about population density etc.
They use a defense mechanism known as “phragmosis”. In case you don’t know them, you can probably figure out from images what they do:
I always thought we should use the design on the abdomen of that spider for manhole covers around the city. It’d be very classy and just the right amount of creepy.
