Entomologist Rick Vetter is enjoying his retirement. The extra time allows him to pursue spider research free from the distraction of what he considers the less fascinating six-legged species that most of his colleagues study. Vetter understands that not everyone...

People who research insects for a living are just like us — totally creeped out by spiders. This is the finding of a paper that earned retired UC Riverside spider expert Richard Vetter a 2020 Ig Nobel Award. Rick Vetter...

[Reblog from Pests in the Urban Landscape] If you were to ask an audience of more than a few people if they or anyone they know has ever seen or been bitten by a brown recluse spider in California, many...

This website presents evidence for the lack of brown recluse spiders as part of the Californian spider fauna. Unfortunately, this contradicts what most Californians believe; beliefs that are born out of media-driven hyperbole and erroneous, anxiety-filled public hearsay which is...

https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=13672

The Situation: The brown widow spider, Latrodectus geometricus, became established in Southern California in early 2000 and has become well entrenched as part of the local spider fauna in urban Los Angeles and San Diego. The brown widow spider is...

J. Med. Entomol. 49(4): 947Ð951 (2012); DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1603/ME11285 ABSTRACT The brown widow spider, Latrodectus geometricus C. L. Koch, has become newly established in southern California during the first decade of the 21st century. Brown widows and egg sacs were collected...

The article that was previously posted here was written in 1998 and is now outdated. Interested readers should seek out the following articles, which are more current. They are listed by the topics they cover so that you may only...