Correction: Horrifying Ontario Spiders

My worst fears have been realized. Thanks to a comment by nosetotale, who responded to my comment on the biting insects post below that I didn't believe there to be any spiders to note up here in Toronto, I learned about our friend the Dock Spider (Pisauridae Dolomedes for you scientists out there).

Dock Spiders skiff across the surface of the water hunting aquatic insects or small fish. That's right SMALL FISH. This is as horrifying to me as those Amazon spiders that hunt birds. They can reach sizes of up to 8 cm and are Ontario's largest spider. The picture to the left shows one with a Toonie, which is around 3 cm in diameter. They are apparently very abundant in Cottage Country. To be perfectly honest, this information is enough to keep me permanently out of Cottage country as spiders absolutely love to chomp on me, and knowing my luck, I would fall in a nest of these suckers. Their bites are not "medically significant," meaning they are not aggressively poisonous, but if they are in any way like a wolf spider, perhaps their bites would bother some people more than others.

Ontario also has wolf spiders, which are pretty ubiquitous throughout North America, as well as Crab Spiders. Now, in my stomping ground in the US, we have lots of wolf spiders and crab spiders, and the wolf spiders just love to bite me and they do grow to the size of yams. In fact, one that was in our house was so huge that I thought it was a picture of a spiders, since it was sitting on a piece of newspaper. Dock Spiders are found in neighboring states to mine, so I would image that watery areas there may harbor (hah hah) these critters, but I, thankfully, did not live near any and, frankly, I will not be a lake-dweller anytime soon.

Roo would actually enjoy living by a lake in Northern Ontario since his fur protects him from flying insects and he loves to eat large spiders. He eats the middles and leaves the legs.