Far more difficult than teaching a cat a trick or eating only one potato chip is the challenge of explaining to someone that the Brown Recluse spider he or she claimed to have recently seen was, in fact, very likely not one. There’s just something about this species that has taken hold of our imaginations; […]
When I first saw the flyer advertising Richard Vetter’s forthcoming book The Brown Recluse Spider on the Cornell University Press table at the 2014 Entomology Society of America convention I thought “Well it’s about time!” After all, I can think of no spider in North America about which there is more misunderstanding and misidentification than the Brown Recluse.