Wolf Spider

Not really. Wolf spiders are not aggressive toward people and bite only when trapped against skin or roughly handled. A bite feels like a bee sting and typically produces short-lived pain, redness, and mild swelling that fades within a day or so; there are no reliably documented cases of wolf spider venom causing serious illness, tissue death, or lasting harm in healthy people. For years some skin ulcers were blamed on wolf spiders, but those were almost always caused by other conditions or, in the Americas, by recluse spiders. Wolf spiders are actually beneficial around homes and crops because they eat large numbers of pest insects.

The clearest features are the eyes and the behaviour. A wolf spider has eight eyes arranged in three rows — four small eyes in a bottom row, then two very large eyes, then two medium eyes on top — the big forward-facing pair is distinctive and gives strong eyeshine at night. They are stocky, hairy, fast-moving, and usually mottled brown or grey for camouflage on the ground. Crucially, you find them running across the ground, on walls, or sitting at a burrow, not sitting in a web — wolf spiders do not build snares. They are often confused with the smaller, more delicate nursery web spiders and with fishing spiders, which are close relatives.

Yes, and the level of maternal care is unusual for a spider. The female first produces a spherical silk egg sac and attaches it to the spinnerets at the tip of her abdomen, carrying it with her as she hunts and lifting her abdomen to keep it off the ground; she will search for it if it is removed. When the spiderlings are ready to emerge she opens the sac, and the dozens to hundreds of tiny young climb onto her back and cling to specialised knobbed hairs on her abdomen. She carries them for one to two weeks, during which they do not feed, before they disperse, often by "ballooning" on strands of silk carried by the wind.

Wolf spiders, like cats and many other nocturnal hunters, have a tapetum lucidum — a reflective membrane behind the retina of their larger eyes that bounces light that missed the light-sensitive cells back through them for a second chance, improving night vision. A side effect is eyeshine — when a beam of light hits the eye straight on, some is reflected back toward the source. If you hold a flashlight or headlamp at eye level and scan a lawn or field at night, wolf spiders show up as distinctive greenish or whitish points of light, sometimes in large numbers, which is a common way researchers survey them.