Chilean Recluse

• GeneralIts bite can cause the skin to necrose; it is the most dangerous of the recluse spiders.
• It has six eyes in three pairs rather than eight, a feature it shares with the other recluse spiders.
• It can survive for months without food or water, which lets it persist in corners of a house that nobody disturbs for long stretches.
• Most bites happen while dressing or going to bed, when the spider is trapped against the skin; shaking out clothes and moving the bed away from the wall are the most effective precautions.
• This is the spider known in Spanish as the araña de rincón, and unlike its North American relative, here the problem is real and serious: it causes most of the world's serious cases of loxoscelism.
• The systemic syndrome, called cutaneous-visceral loxoscelism, includes haemolysis, kidney failure and coagulopathy, and can be fatal, above all in children. It occurs in a minority of cases, but that minority is the one that matters.
• In Chile it is a recognised public health problem, with public prevention campaigns and antivenom available.
• It lives inside houses and is extraordinarily synanthropic: most homes in some Chilean cities are estimated to harbour specimens.
• Like all Loxosceles, it has six eyes in three pairs, and that is the reliable identification character.
• Most bites happen at night, in bed, or when dressing in clothes that have been put away.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (arachnid)

Habitat & environment

House interiors, corners and box rooms

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxosceles_laeta