And that is just about enough of that...MR Bat Critter !!!! :lol: :lol: :twisted:

 

You sure you don't want me to launch into a disseration on spiders? 8)

The ant one was pretty cool. It was a Yahoo story today, right when we were talking about that very type of thing on this thread. Thought it was spookily relevant.

 

What's with the spiders? Just curious. My mom got bit by a brown recluse once, talk about poisonous. The scar it left looks like a bullet hole.

 

I've been bitten, too. Twice. I didn't have much of a reaction the first time, but I was pretty concerned the second time. The 2nd bite was on the inside of my bicep and the discoloration area was the size of a baseball. When the bulls-eye broke, though, I went right into cleansing mode and didn't end up with a bad reaction at all. It just pitted out for a couple weeks, then healed over quite nicely.

 

I don't seem to react that badly to them. Just a mark about the size of a match-head. But, there are others that seem to actually lose a lot of tissue in the area of the bite. I'm told that it's actually a "staff infection" that sets in and does the real damage. I'm also told that the more bites you get, the more sensitive you become, and this may be true because I do know it's true with poison ivy.

I"m not all that concerned about what we have here, but down in Argentina, I think it is, there is a catipillar that has spines with an extreme poison that will kill anyone that touches them. They don't know where they came from, but they've got them.

For now, I think the snakes and spiders are bad enough. We really don't need anymore.

 

At the time we didn't know what was happening. Within 24-48 hours my mom was getting the chills and not feeling well. I looked at the wound and told her that something was wrong because it wasn't healing right. That's when she saw the doctor and found out what bit her. At it's worst the bite sight was the size of a quarter and you could fit about 4 quarters in it. That's how deep it was.

 

Recluse venom is nasty, but it's not a killing venom like a Black Widow's, which is a neurotoxin and works by shutting down organs and body functions. Instead, recluse venom necrotizes the tissue and does exactly what the flesh eating virus does. Google or Yahoo images on spider bites and more specifically recluse bites...you'll see some truly unbelievable (grossly so) pictures. People lose entire arms and legs due to recluse bites.

 

My mom's bite was gross enough and I have seen those pictures on the web. She got bit on her left shoulder blade. She had to go to a general surgeon to get all the dead tissue out. He scraped of a lot because it was about 3-4 days, after the bite, before she saw him. We, me and my dad, were the ones who cleaned out the wound everyday. My brother couldn't do it. The scar looks like a bullet wound now.

 

I was bit behind my left knee, right on the inner portion of the joint of the knee, by a Black Widow in July of 06. The bite happened about 6:30 in the morning while I was loading a roll-off box onto a trailer. By the time I had the box secured, weighed and driven to the shipping office of the plant, the area was bright red and had swollen to the size of a softball.

LOL...I commented to the lady whom processed haz-waste manifests, that a critter had bitten my leg, and she ordered me to roll up the legging of my coveralls. One look at that sucker and she had an EMT come to the office (Plant EMT office was across the hall) to look at it.... they had me on a stretcher and headed to a hospitol 5 minutes later. 3 weeks of pain and drain followed...I was a really unhappy camper for the first couple days. The bite started ozzing yellow stuff while I was laying on the exam-table at St. E. Turns out that Black Widows aren't great for your heart, especially when you do a lot of binder ratcheting, cable tugging and tarp tugging, after getting bit.

The doctor took one look at the area and started me on anti-venom for BW bite. He didn't wait for lab run to be finished.

A side bar to the whole ordeal...they found some spiders that are brown in color, with an orange hour glass just like the Black Widow has..and it turns out to be twice as poisonous as the BW. They have found those suckers in FL, AL, MS, LA and TX Gulf Coast areas...probably came in by boat from South America.

Lotta good Border Patrol does.

Kill the spiders...kill em all I say!

I use boric acid (powder version) to keep critters out of the house down here...works good too.

 

Those other ones are brown widows or red widows. I think they're native to Australia (they call them redback spiders, I believe) and yeah, we have a few of them here in the states...pretty much the same range as the blacks that are native here.

Sounds like when you got lanced, you had an infection/reaction go with it. My black widow bite was on the hand and it put me in the hospital for about 3 hours, hooked up to a heart monitor. But I didn't have any other reaction to it...just felt like I had been hit by a truck for about a week. The joint and muscle pain associated with a widow bite is excruciating.

I had a friend a long time ago that was out moving boards in the barn with her husband. She picked up a board and thought she had punched her finger on a nail...it even bled like it. Flipped the board over and it was the biggest black widow she had ever seen. She said the body was about as big as a silver dollar.

She took off toward the house (about 60 yards away) and made it 30 before she collapsed. She was in IC for about a week, in the hospital for over 2 weeks and very nearly died. She said it took about 3 months before she was finally free of the after-affects.

Scary stuff.