Spider Bite! :-(

One of the downsides to all the monsoon rain we've been getting, it brings the spiders and bugs out. Today at daycare Evan was "bit" by a tarantula. The daycare director said this was the first time in the 20 years she has been there that this has happened. The kids were outside for waterplay and they managed to capture the spider so we could take it to the ER with us. It was just a precaution to take him to the ER since the daycare personnel had already contacted poison control and knew this wasn't an emergency situation.

Luckily, Evan didn't have an allergic reaction to the bites. By the time we picked him up, he was playing like nothing unusual happened aside from all the attention he was getting. The spider was definitely the hit of the ER for the morning. We figured out it was a male and it was about 4-5 inches across.

The spider left 8 marks on him that look like bite marks, but the spacing between them seemed too big for a bite. The ER doctor thinks maybe the spider pinched him, which he said is typical for tarantulas. One of the ER nurses thought maybe Evan was having an skin reaction to the hairs on the spider since that is also a defense mechanism for tarantulas. After about an hour in the ER we really don't know exactly how the marks got there (if it was a bite, a pinch, or from hairs), but Evan's absolutely fine. T took the spider and released him back into the wild up on post.

The bite trail:




Evan was his normal nutty self waiting for the doc:


Click here if you want to read more about tarantula bites: http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/TOPIC550.HTM