LAKE VERMILION, M.N. (OUTDOORS REPORT) – I’ve heard stories of men being mauled to death by grizzly bears on moose hunts in the Yukon and trail runners being stalked by mountain lions on the North Shore of Lake Superior. And while those tales and similar stories of death and near-death experiences in the outdoors rank near the top of scary second-hand experiences, I’ve had no such close calls that made me truly nervous.  Until this weekend.

Let me preface this tale and informative article by saying that I’m not a fan of spiders.  As a child I was once bitten by one in bed as it must have slid behind my back on the old pullout couch at the lake cabin, leaving 68 swollen bite marks which my brother counted from my right shoulder to my left hip.  Add on a few viewings of the movie Arachnaphobia in my teenage years, and despite all the comedic relief of John Goodman as the over-the-top pest control technician, my own fear of spiders was well established to the point the only thing I want to know about them is the color they turn under the heel of my boot with a crunch and a squish.

And let me qualify that before getting into this with, yes, I know, that’s not a very conservation-minded thing for an outdoors writer to put in print for a critter that keeps other, more annoying nasties like mosquitos in check.

But after a spin around the lake in the pontoon toward the pizza joint on the west end, and the dipping of a favorite crankbait off the side of the craft while my kids argued over who saw the first loon, then the first cormorant, then the first eagle as we pulled into the dock for the tavern just up the shore, the other occupants and I came face-to-face with what I’d find out was the second biggest spider in North America and the biggest to grace Minnesota with its shudder-inducing size.  After deploying the bumpers and locking in the front dock line, a shout from my brother-in-law of “look at that spider” caught my attention, but not as quickly as the four-inch blur of bulbous body and legs that sprinted across the dock planking a couple feet in front of me.  It literally looked like an extra from the 1990s film previously mentioned.

Finding its hiding place on the far side of the dock, just over the edge of the two-by-four planking, I mustered the courage to lower my phone and snap a picture, before the spider spooked, jumped on the surface of the water and began swimming – yes, at Michael Phelps speed, SWIMMING! – toward my position.  Thankfully, the spider stalled, grabbed the next bumper and climbed up off the surface, sitting in the sun and staying put until everyone disembarked.

With a quick search of the internet while waiting for our pizza, I determined it was a dark fishing spider, but its location on the dock was mere coincidence, as they don’t actually angle for fish and are most often found away from water.  Eating larger insects and smaller vertebrates (how “small” I wondered – frogs? mice? infant children!?) the female can grow to have a leg span of over three inches.  The male is less heralded, serving only as a mate that dies after copulation, and as a result, just never gets as big.

Females carry around an egg sac for a portion of the summer that contains up to 1,400 eggs, before attaching it to a tree when the next generation hatches.  I shuddered imagining more than a thousand more of these dock greeters spreading along the shoreline, with a nearly-four-inch harbinger of week long bouts of the imagined crawlies available on every future landing.

While I learned a lot from the encounter, I was more than happy to not meet up with the fisher spider on the dock as we returned to the boat from our lunch.  Certainly something that large has its place in controlling nuisance species like biting flies and other annoying insects (along with unattended children), I was glad it was no longer part of our day, and it could return to its space, and me to mine safe in the lounger, with fishing rod in hand and the sun overhead.

A Damn Big Spider
By Nick Simonson

Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors. The dark fishing spider encountered by the author finds a hiding spot on the side of a dock on Lake Vermilion in northeastern Minnesota, two-by-fours for perspective. Simonson Photo.