Spider Control in Tucson

Black widows in Tucson: where they live and why they come first

The western black widow, Latrodectus hesperus, is the spider Tucson providers get called about most, and it is the one worth taking seriously. The female is a quarter to three-quarters of an inch in the body, glossy black, with a red-orange hourglass on the underside of a round abdomen. She hangs upside down in a messy, surprisingly strong web built low to the ground in a dark, protected spot. The male is less than half her size, brown with cream markings, and not the problem.

Around a Tucson house, that dark protected spot is predictable. Garages, especially the floor perimeter and behind stored boxes. The hollow cores and weep holes of block walls. Under patio tables and chairs, inside pool equipment boxes and water meter boxes, in woodpiles, in the gap behind a hose reel. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum lists garages, lawn furniture and woodpiles as classic widow real estate, and anyone who has reached under a patio chair to fold it in October knows why. One female lays several egg sacs over her life, each holding on the order of 300 eggs, so a garage with a dozen webs in September started with one spider in spring.

Widows are shy and nocturnal. Bites almost always happen when a hand goes somewhere it cannot see: a glove left in the garage, a stack of pavers, the underside of a grill cover. Keep that in mind and you have prevented most bites already.

Black widow bite symptoms and when to get medical care

A black widow bite often starts as a pinprick and turns into cramping an hour later. The Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, the poison center that covers Tucson and Pima County, describes pain, cramping and stiffness that can appear in the shoulders, back, chest or abdomen, along with nausea, vomiting, headache, anxiety and high blood pressure. Adults usually get through it in a day or two with treatment. Deaths are rare, and an antivenom exists for severe cases.

Are there brown recluse spiders in Tucson? The honest answer

The brown recluse, Loxosceles reclusa, is not established in Arizona. The University of Arizona Cooperative Extension says there are no established populations of brown recluse spiders in the state, and the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center places that species in the Midwest. Most "brown recluse bites" diagnosed in Tucson turn out to be infections, other bites or something else entirely.

What Tucson does have is the brown recluse's desert relatives. The Arizona brown spider, Loxosceles arizonica, is native and fairly abundant in southern Arizona, and the desert recluse, Loxosceles deserta, lives in the western half of the state. Both are tan, about a third of an inch in the body, with six eyes in three pairs instead of the usual eight and a faint violin on the back. Both prefer desert debris, pack rat nests and the outskirts of town to a tidy urban garage, which is why Foothills and Vail homes backing onto open desert meet them more often than midtown does. Their venom works like their famous cousin's: little pain at first, then a slow, sometimes blistering wound over hours to days. The poison center's line is that medical treatment is always advised when a brown spider bite is suspected, so do not wait that one out.

If you have a pack rat nest against the house, you may have recluse relatives too. It is one more reason pack rat control and spider control tend to get done together here.

Wolf spiders, tarantulas and the ones you can leave alone

Most of the big spiders that make Tucson newcomers yelp are harmless, and several of them are on your side. The desert blonde tarantula, Aphonopelma chalcodes, is the hairy one crossing your driveway in August; those are males wandering to find females during the monsoon, as the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum notes, and a bite is comparable to a bee sting and almost never happens. Wolf spiders are the fast brown hunters that sprint across the garage floor, build no webs, and eat the crickets that feed scorpions. Jumping spiders and cellar spiders round out the usual suspects. None of them needs an exterminator.

How Tucson spider exterminators actually treat black widows

Good spider control is mostly physical work with targeted product behind it. Spiders walk on the tips of their legs and sit in webs rather than on treated surfaces, so a perimeter spray alone does less to a black widow than it does to an ant. A licensed local provider doing it right will usually:

• De-web the whole exterior with a pole brush: eaves, window frames, block walls, meter boxes, light fixtures, under patio furniture
• Remove egg sacs by hand, because a sac that hatches after the visit restarts the problem
• Treat harborage directly: block wall weep holes and voids, the garage perimeter, under stairs, behind stored items, pool equipment
• Apply an exterior perimeter treatment and dust the voids where widows sit
• Cut the food supply by treating crickets, roaches and other insects, and recommend yellow bulbs at entry lights
• Schedule a follow-up, since widows rebuild and new ones move in from the desert

On your side: keep the garage floor clear, store boxes on shelves off the floor, wear gloves when you move pavers or firewood, and shake out shoes and pool toys. Scorpions and widows use the same block wall voids, so a provider treating one is almost always treating the other; see scorpion control in Tucson if you have both.

Typical spider control cost in Tucson and what to check before you hire

These are typical market ranges across the Tucson metro, not a quote. The provider you are connected with sets the price after seeing the property.

• One-time black widow or spider treatment with de-webbing: roughly $100 to $300
• Spider control bundled into a general pest plan: roughly $100 to $300 for the initial visit, then roughly $35 to $75 per month or $90 to $165 per quarterly visit
• Block wall void and weep hole treatment: often included, sometimes an add-on on large properties
• Web removal on its own: usually part of the service, not billed separately

Before you hire, confirm the company and the applicator are licensed by the Arizona Department of Agriculture, Pest Management Division, which regulates every structural pest control business in the state. Ask whether de-webbing and egg sac removal are included, whether block walls get treated, and what the re-service policy is if webs come back in two weeks. The providers in our network are independent and licensed; when you call, you are routed by ZIP code to one that covers your address, from Oro Valley to Green Valley. For the rest of what lives in a Tucson yard, start at pest control in Tucson.