Six Spiders That Look Like a Brown Recluse (And Are Not)

Six spiders account for the overwhelming majority of mistaken recluse reports. Each one has at least one feature a recluse never has, and once you know which feature to look for on each, none of them are difficult to separate.

The six, and what gives each one away

The woodlouse hunter deserves a paragraph

It is the one lookalike that defeats the best recluse test. Dysdera crocata really does have six eyes, so counting eyes will not separate it.

Everything else about it is different, and obviously so. The jaws are huge and point forward like pincers — they are built for prising open woodlice, and you cannot miss them. The abdomen is plump, smooth and pale grey-pink. The front body section is a deep orange-red, not tan. Nobody who has seen the two side by side confuses them again.

The one that causes most false alarms

Wolf spiders generate more mistaken reports than the other five combined. They are common across the whole country, they are brown, and they move fast across open floors at exactly the moment you are least inclined to study them.

They are also two to three times the size of a recluse, carry conspicuous spines along their legs, and have an eye arrangement visible without any magnification at all: two large eyes facing forward like headlights, with a row of four smaller ones beneath them. A recluse has nothing remotely like this. In most encounters size alone is decisive — size settles it.

Cellar spiders, and the myth attached to them

Cellar spiders are the pale, impossibly leggy spiders in the corner of every basement and garage. They get reported as recluses because they are tan and live in the same places.

They are also the animal at the centre of the most persistent spider myth in circulation — the claim that they are the most venomous spider alive but cannot bite through human skin. Both halves are false, and the story has been told about three unrelated animals. Where the myth came from.

What none of the six have

A brown recluse is uniform tan, entirely patternless, fine-haired, small, and six-eyed with the eyes in three separated pairs.

A single deviation from that description is enough. You do not need to check all five features — banded legs alone, or a patterned abdomen alone, or an eight-eye count alone, ends the question.

Where this leaves you

Outside the recluse range, a lookalike is not merely possible, it is overwhelmingly the likely answer. Inside it, the eye count remains the fastest way to settle things, and it costs a phone macro shot and about ten seconds.

For the range itself, and why most of the United States sits outside it, see do brown recluses live where you do.