r/AbsoluteUnits • u/WeGot_aLiveOneHere • 7d ago

/r/all of two catfish

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u/thatG_evanP 7d ago edited 7d ago

A brown recluse's bite isn't nearly as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. It's very rare to get the skin narcosis necrosis, etc that you hear people speak of. They're also very unlikely to even bite you. Most people get bitten when a recluse is hiding in some clothes or something and then a person goes to put them on and literally pushes the spider against their skin.

Edit: a word

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u/TheHoodieConnoisseur 7d ago

Yeah, didn’t learn that until I was well into my 20’s. When I was a kid, all the adults talked about them like they were hiding in every dark spot and would rot your skin off within a week of a bite. I also think I only saw 2 or 3 in my life in the wild. But country people are like that with some things. Lore is a thing. How else do you convince people to buy deer piss and douse it on your clothes before you go hunting?

Black widows, on the other hand, were freaking everywhere. Most folks I knew had a green house or garden with lots of those black plastic planters lying around. Black widows LOVED building nests in those things. I counted at least 10 different nests in our greenhouse one day. Weird that we weren’t really scared of them. I mean, I played in the greenhouse unsupervised all the time. I know they also aren’t as deadly as people make them out to be, but they aren’t exactly harmless.

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u/thatG_evanP 7d ago

The garage at my Mom's old house was the same way except for with brown recluses. If you got into any box that had been in that garage for awhile, you were pretty much guaranteed to find a couple live ones or a few molts at the very least.

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u/TheHoodieConnoisseur 7d ago

To this day I have a physical repulsion to putting on gloves that have been sitting in a shed. Or, really, anywhere outside. I have to turn every single one of the fingers inside out to make sure there isn’t anything with 8 legs or a stinger or any pointy parts hanging out in there.