Here’s a fun quiz for all you aspiring arachnologists out there:

What small, brown spider is indigenous to the southern United States, possesses three pairs of eyes instead of four, is sometimes called a “fiddleback” due to a distinctive violin-shaped marking on the top of its cephalothorax, and is equipped with a highly toxic venom which can cause severe tissue necrosis?

You guessed it!  It’s loxosceles reclusa, the brown recluse!  For those of you who aren’t versed in the physiology of arthropods, here’s what a brown recluse looks like:

Normally the brown recluse has eight legs like other spiders, but this poor fellow sustained some damage after an unfortunate encounter with the reflex action of my hand.  I’m a light sleeper, and nearly any disturbance will wake me.  Around 5:30 this morning I suddenly found myself conscious of something crawling on my face, evoking an immediate swipe of the hand.  Figuring that the problem was taken care of, I turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but anxiety quickly forced me to get up and look for whatever I had just swatted.  I quickly found this little guy curled up in my bed about where I was lying.  It looked familiar and I couldn’t shake the suspicion that it was a recluse, so I looked it up online and confirmed its identity.  Of course I couldn’t go back to sleep after having a brown recluse crawl on my face (why couldn’t it have been a harmless jumping spider?).  I was keenly aware that recluse bites can be very nasty and aren’t always felt immediately.  Fortunately so far, so good.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to sleep again, though.