Wolf Spider

With eight eyes and a hairy body up to 2 inches long, wolf spiders can be fairly frightening if you come across them in your home. In addition, these spiders have a painful bite (although not lethal) when they feel threatened.

Wolf spiders primarily hunt at night and can live in many places around your home and yard, including:

• Open areas such as fields and grassy areas
• In wood or brush piles
• Around doors and windows
• In basements and garages

These spiders don’t weave webs, but instead, lay their eggs in ground tunnels or burrows. They come indoors in the winter when they’re looking for warmth.

Wolf spiders are naturally camouflaged with gray, black, and brown splotches of color. They are sometimes confused with brown recluse spiders, but they don’t have the violin-shaped marking on their backs that brown recluse spiders carry.

The eight eyes of the brown recluse are arranged in three rows:

• Front row—four small eyes
• Middle row—two large and prominent eyes
• Back row—medium-sized eyes that are off to the side

Female wolf spiders lay dozens of eggs at a time and carry their egg sacks at the end of their abdomens. The hatchlings look like miniature adults. Wolf spiders shed their skins several times as they grow older. Although male wolf spiders live only one year, female wolf spiders can live for several years.

To keep wolf spiders out of your home, seal cracks around doors and windows. Kill individual spiders as you see them, but don’t handle them—they do bite!