I have a confession to make. From June 2021 until the spring of 2023, I murdered dozens of innocent victims. I didn’t even bother to learn their names. As soon as one appeared, the closest shoe or magazine became a fatal weapon. All I knew was that these enemies were terrifying, mud-colored creatures, and they were everywhere: the garage, the porch, the grass, the shed. My MO was to eradicate them by any means necessary, because unless you are an arachnophile, spiders look scary, and therefore they must be squished.
Cut to 2024, and I would not harm a wolf spider (any of the nearly 2,500 members of the family Lycosidae) if you paid me. I wouldn’t even accept a million trillion five thousand 64 billion 7 dollars, as my seven-year-old son says. I now view them as hairy, eight-legged innocents. They are outfitted with three rows of eyes. That’s right. Like most spiders, they’re blessed with eight legs and eight eyes. If you look at a picture of a wolf spider’s face up close, you’ll see that it is adorable, like the spider version of a Star Wars Ewok. There’s a bottom row of four small eyes, a middle row of two large peepers, and a top row of two medium-sized gazers, allowing the critters to see in all directions. While most spiders have middling vision, wolf spiders possess excellent eyesight. This comes in handy, since the wolf spider doesn’t laze around in its web all day like a slacker, waiting for prey to get stuck so it can amble over and immobilize it. Wolf spiders get out there and hunt. As the Missouri Department of Conservation website describes it, these arachnids ambush their prey or, true to their name, “run it down like a wolf.”
The reason I’ve experienced this murderer-to-protector trajectory with wolf spiders is because in 2021, we moved into a neighborhood in Hutto, about thirty minutes northeast of Austin, that I call countryish, since our area still has a few wide-open fields full of cows, horses, and donkeys. Surrounding most fields, you’ll find brand spanking new six-hundred-home housing developments, which seem to pop up overnight. Despite all this infuriating construction, the wild creatures endure. And they seem to creep ever closer to my house (or, perhaps more accurately, our homes are creeping closer to theirs). Wolf spiders are active year-round, but you may be more likely to encounter one this time of year. “There is usually a rise in activity in the fall, when the temperatures become more tolerable,” says Valerie Bugh, author of the quick-reference guide Spiders of Texas.
According to Taylor Donaldson, an assistant research scientist at the tick research laboratory at Texas A&M University, about 64 wolf spider species live in Texas. And those are just the ones we know about. Eric Neubauer, a spider enthusiast and master naturalist in Davilla, about forty minutes northeast of Hutto, discovered a new wolf spider species in March. (Russell Pfau, a biologist at Tarleton State University, used DNA analysis to confirm the find.) Neubauer and Donaldson say there are likely more wolf spider species in the state that haven’t yet been documented.
Wolf spiders are found statewide in Texas, across a wide variety of habitats. (In fact, you can find them almost anywhere on the planet, except in Antarctica.) “Some species prefer riparian areas like marshes, bogs, swamps, stream banks, and riverbanks, and others prefer forests, grasslands, desert, and intertidal areas,” says Donaldson. “So they’re pretty much everywhere.” One of the more formidably named species is the rabid wolf spider (Rabidosa rabida), which is distinguished by specific stripes and markings. Despite the name, it does not carry rabies, nor does it have a rabid personality. Like all wolf spiders, it’ll only bite if you sit on it or provoke it. And if it does bite you, it may hurt, but you’ll live. It took me a while to accept this reality. Hence all the squishing.
When you live a countryish life with some acreage, you (hopefully) come to understand that instead of eradicating the wild creatures surrounding you, you need to learn to coexist, peacefully, with coyotes, bobcats, armadillos, skunks, vultures, snakes, and, of course, spiders. That said, I am not going to cuddle an armadillo or nuzzle a speckled king snake. On the other hand, instead of being judgy about armadillos and viewing them as gray balls of disease, I now believe they are cute when they run, as long as they are running away from me. So, when it comes to a nonvenomous snake or a coyote that is way more scared of me than I am of it, I like to think my opinions have evolved.
One summer day soon after we moved into our house, back when I still feared coyotes and armadillos, my son let out a bloodcurdling scream from the shed. I sprinted over to find him pointing at a brown spider that had a large, disgusting white bubble on its back. I grabbed a shovel and slaughtered it without hesitation. I was doing what any mother would do in a dangerous situation: protecting my child from a fearsome, 1.5-inch-long enemy that was perched on a wood plank, minding its own business.
That disgusting bubble, I would come to learn via some online sleuthing, was an egg sac. In my effort to save my son, I had butchered a fellow mom.
Like scorpions, female wolf spiders carry their babies on their backs. When they lay their eggs, they spin and shape an egg sac, a process Donaldson says could take three hours or more. The female then attaches the sac to her spinnerets (the silk-spinning organs at the end of her abdomen), toting it around with her for anywhere from a week or two to several months. The moms protect the sacs from predators, moving between shaded and sunny areas to keep the babies at just the right temperature. Another fun fact, which makes me feel like even more of a monster for killing that spider in the shed, comes from Bugh. She says the silk covering of the egg sac can be tough to penetrate. “When the eggs hatch, the babies cannot break out of the sac, but they make noises to tell the mother to open it for them,” she says.
If that doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, maybe this will: Wolf spiders eat roaches. They also eat other insects that can annoy us, such as crickets, mosquitoes, moths, and grasshoppers. In turn, these spiders serve as food for birds, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, other spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and parasitic spider wasps. A spider wasp will sting a wolf spider, immobilize it, and drag it to its lair, where it will then lay an egg on the poor spider. Then the wasp larva eats the spider’s body from the inside out. If this were a Marvel movie, I would one million trillion five thousand 64 billion 7 percent root for the spider.
I didn’t become a one-woman wolf spider appreciation society overnight. It took a while after I killed the one in the shed, but eventually, mainly because there were just so many of them, I came to see them as a harmless part of the landscape. My son, who quickly grew from a terrified toddler into a kid who loves catching lizards, toads, moths, and spiders, helped me become a gentler, kinder person when it comes to most critters. We now go “hunting” for wolf spiders with our neighbor Stephanie. One summer night, she asked if we wanted to meet her outside so she could show us how to shine a spotlight into the grass and see “the glow of wolf spiders blinking.”
That sounded like epic entertainment to us, so we met her outside and followed her around as she shone her light. Sure enough, the spotlight beam caught tiny, bright flashes of light in the grass. There seemed to be hundreds of them out there, and my son even picked one up and let it crawl on his palm. I am not recommending that all children do this, because if a spider bites your kid, I would like to not be blamed. While the spider sat on my son’s palm, I held my breath and tried not to morph back into paranoid-mom mode. The spider didn’t attack him like some eight-legged Cujo; it simply leapt off his hand and disappeared into the night.
I tell Donaldson and Neubauer about our spotlight hunting experience, and Neubauer is quick to correct me about the whole blinking thing. The flashes of light in the grass don’t result from blinking, since spiders don’t have eyelids. “The ‘blinking’ is caused by intervening plant stalks and leaves or the spider changing its position,” he says. Fair enough. It turns out that wolf spiders are famous in certain circles for their reflective eyes. It looked like there were hundreds of spiders in the grass that night, and Donaldson says it wouldn’t be unheard-of if there were 10,000 to 100,000 wolf spiders per acre.
That statistic will either make your skin crawl or simply fill you with immense respect for wolf spiders and the glorious power of nature. Just remember: All those wolf spiders aren’t looking to ambush you. They just want to live their lives, protect their spiderlings, and snack on some roaches. I wouldn’t be thrilled to see a wolf spider on my pillow at night, crawling toward my face, but they deserve to be here more than we do. So, please, put down the shovels and the shoes and let them thermoregulate their babies and thrive. In an ideal world, most of them will be thriving outside your house.
