Hot summer means more spiders

Record-breaking temperatures and dry conditions are apparently breeding grounds for spiders.

Entomologist Jason Everitt is weaving the web of a frightening tale.

"They'll eat their own. If there's no food source they will consume each other...kind of a cannibalistic kind of thing," he said.

And those things that creep and crawl around while you sleep are on the rise thanks to this summer's drought.

“There are lots of brown recluse spiders and black widows and I think that's a little more from the temperatures outside pushing them into garages and things like that," said Everitt.

Everitt is an entomologist with Rottler Pest Control.

"You're crawling in a crawl space or you're in an attic with hundreds of these and you literally step on the insulation and you just see the insulation move."

"They don't spin a big large web like a Charlotte's Web type. Those are orb weavers, which you'll see them out around the lights, around the perimeters of the house. This spider here spins a small web and they use that as a defense mechanism to literally retreat once they go out and hunt and bite whatever food source they're gonna go after and then they retreat in there and that just protects them," said Everitt.

To protect yourself, call the experts and put the bug in a bag.

"When you put on that jacket or the pair of shoes, slippers, they bite out of just sheer defense," he said.

So shake it out before you put it on...and with cooler temperatures at night, arachnids are going to stay on the rise.

"When it gets cool in the evenings, they're going to push towards the house because there again, that temperature, our temperature is a nice temperature for them," said Everitt.

The brown recluse spider is smaller than you might imagine, about the size of a quarter. It's tan in color and has a dark spot in the shape of a violin on its body.