Just in time for Halloween, western Washington spider season in full swing

Just in time for Halloween, there’s no shortage of spiders crawling around our area these days.

You can’t help but run into webs, as spiders of all sorts seek out their last meals of the year, says Arlo Pelegrin, an entomologist with the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

“They like to make their webs in places that are conspicuous that we walk through,” Pelegrin says. “It’s time for them to reproduce. They’ve been fattening up on the summer bugs and right now the bugs are really dropping off because the temperatures are getting lower and the spiders are on hand to snap them up.”

It might seem like there’s just one kind of spider, but Pelegrin says there are at least four different types weaving their webs around the Puget Sound region.

The spider we’re likely seeing the most is the Cross Orbweaver, which spins a large, circular-patterned web.

Inside the house, Pelegrin says the long-bodied cellar spider is making a regular appearance in bathrooms, laundry rooms and other warm places. It’s pretty common and easily recognizable with its long legs and hammock-shaped nets.

All these creepy-crawlers can freak people out, but Pelegrin says there’s nothing to worry about. They’re completely harmless, and while they eat other bugs and even spiders, they rarely or never bite.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon, if you ask a room full of people, ‘Who here has been bitten by a spider?’ you get a lot of hands going up,” Pelegrin says.”But if you ask ‘who here has seen a spider actually biting a person in real life?’ You don’t see many hands up to that question, usually none.”

Pelegrin says the medical community commonly misdiagnoses spider bites, attributing them to many bumps on the skin that are actually something else.