7 Common Pests Found In Austin And How To Identify Them
Fire ants, spiders, fleas, wasps, and more: the quick field marks that tell you which Austin pest you’re looking at.
Read post →Yes, brown recluse spiders live in Central Texas, including Austin, Leander, and the rest of Travis and Williamson counties. The most reliable way to identify one is its eyes: a brown recluse has six eyes arranged in three pairs, while most spiders have eight.
The famous violin marking helps, but it can be faint, and plenty of harmless spiders carry a similar dark shape. Below is how to identify a brown recluse, where they hide in Texas homes, what a bite actually does (usually far less than the internet suggests), and what really works to control them.
How Do You Identify a Brown Recluse Spider?
Check several features, not just one. A spider has to match all of them to be a recluse:
| Feature | Brown recluse | Most look-alikes |
|---|---|---|
| Eyes | Six eyes in three pairs: one pair in front, one pair on each side | Eight eyes, usually in two rows |
| Size | Body about 3/8 inch long. With legs, about the size of a quarter to a half-dollar | A body longer than 1/2 inch rules out a recluse |
| Color | One even color, light tan to grayish brown | Often striped, banded, or two-toned |
| Marking | Dark violin shape on the front body section, with the neck of the violin pointing back toward the abdomen | Many spiders have dark markings in the same spot |
| Legs | One solid color, fine hairs, no spines, no bands | Visible spines, stripes, or banding |
| Abdomen | One solid color with no pattern | Patterns, spots, or chevrons |
You will need a magnifying glass or a zoomed-in photo to count the eyes. If a spider has banded legs, spines, or a patterned abdomen, it is not a brown recluse, no matter what the violin looks like. The spiders most often mistaken for recluses include cellar spiders, funnel weavers, and orbweavers. For the other spiders you are likely to find around a Central Texas home, see our spider identification guide.
Which Recluse Spiders Live in Texas?
Texas A&M AgriLife lists several recluse species in the state. The one documented around Austin is the brown recluse, Loxosceles reclusa. Museum specimens have been collected in Austin itself and in caves in both Travis and Williamson counties.
The Texas recluse (Loxosceles devia) is recorded mostly in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, and the Big Bend recluse (Loxosceles blanda) in Far West Texas. The species look nearly identical, and everything on this page about hiding spots, bites, and control applies to all of them.
Where Do Brown Recluses Hide in Texas Homes?
The name says it all: they want dry, dark, undisturbed places. Indoors, that usually means:
- Garages, especially between stored boxes, boards, and things that rarely get moved.
- Closets, in clothing, shoes, and linens that sit for weeks at a time.
- Attics and crawl spaces.
- Cardboard boxes and anything else in long-term storage.
Outdoors, they shelter under rocks, logs, old boards, and junk or wood piles. Brown recluses hunt at night and do not use webs to catch prey, so you rarely see them in the open. They can also go many months without food or water, which is why an unused storage room is not a spider-free storage room.
When Are Brown Recluses Most Active in Texas?
According to Texas A&M AgriLife, brown recluses are active outdoors from spring through fall, and indoors they can be active all year. Mating runs from about April through July, and an adult can live for several years. In a heated or cooled Texas home, there is no off season.
What Happens If a Brown Recluse Bites You?
Brown recluses are not aggressive, and they do not chase people. Bites happen when a spider gets trapped against bare skin: pulling on clothes or shoes that have been sitting unworn, rolling onto one in bed, or reaching into a stored box. Their fangs are too small to bite through clothing.
Most bites turn out to be minor. About 90 percent of brown recluse bites heal without severe scarring. The bite is often painless at first, with redness and swelling developing over the next 3 to 8 hours, and most bites resolve within about three weeks. In a minority of cases the skin at the bite breaks down into a dry, sunken, bluish patch that heals slowly. Rarely, and more often in children, the venom causes a whole-body illness that affects the blood and kidneys. Deaths are extremely rare.
It is also worth knowing that many wounds blamed on brown recluses turn out to be something else entirely, such as MRSA and other bacterial skin infections. That is one more reason to have a doctor look at any wound that is spreading or not healing, instead of assuming it was a spider.
First aid for a suspected brown recluse bite
This follows guidance from the Texas Department of State Health Services and the CDC. We are pest control professionals, not medical providers, so call a doctor or poison center with any questions.
- Wash the bite with soap and water.
- Apply ice or a cold compress, and elevate the area if you can.
- If it is safe to do, catch the spider (even a squashed one helps) so it can be identified.
- Call the Texas Poison Center Network at 1-800-222-1222.
- Get medical care for a severe reaction, a wound that keeps getting worse, or symptoms like fever. Do not try to cut out the bite or remove venom yourself.
The Kansas House With 2,055 Brown Recluses
One study puts the risk in perspective. Researchers collected 2,055 brown recluses over six months from an occupied house in Lenexa, Kansas. The family of four living there had been in the home for eight years, and none of them had ever been bitten (Vetter and Barger, Journal of Medical Entomology, 2002).
The takeaway is not that brown recluses are harmless. It is that they avoid people, and that the right response to finding one is steady, practical control rather than panic.
How Do You Get Rid of Brown Recluse Spiders?
Honestly, an established brown recluse population is hard to eliminate. Sprays work only when they touch the spider directly, and the University of Kentucky notes that foggers are seldom effective. What works is a layered approach recommended by Texas A&M and university extension services:
- Monitor with sticky traps. Place them flat along baseboards and walls, in closets, and in the garage. They show you whether you have recluses and where they are concentrated.
- Cut the clutter. Swap cardboard boxes for sealed plastic bins, and keep storage off the floor.
- Shake out clothes and shoes before wearing anything that has been sitting, and run stored clothing through a hot dryer cycle.
- Protect the beds. Pull beds away from the wall, skip the bed skirt, and keep the space underneath clear.
- Seal the entry points. Close gaps under doors and cracks around the house, and move firewood away from the foundation.
- Treat where they actually live. Extension guidance for established infestations calls for professional treatment, including dusts in wall voids and attics plus a perimeter treatment.
Spiders are covered under our home pest control service. If you are catching recluses on sticky traps or finding them in the garage or closets, every visit starts with an inspection to find where they are living before we treat. Free estimates from our Leander and northwest Austin offices, or call (512) 267-0812.
Sources
- Texas A&M AgriLife, Field Guide to Common Texas Insects: Recluse spiders
- Texas A&M AgriLife Today: Brown recluse spider
- Texas Department of State Health Services: Spiders
- CDC / NIOSH: Venomous spiders
- UC Riverside: How to identify (and misidentify) a brown recluse
- University of Kentucky Entomology: Brown recluse spider
- Vetter and Barger, Journal of Medical Entomology 39:948-951 (2002)
