What Bit Him?

Dan Rubinoff, in the Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences, was interviewed for KHON’s story about a local man bitten by an unknown spider. The bite caused tremendous pain, swelling, even tissue damage, and people want to know what caused it!

Dan says whenever there’s a bad reaction to a bite like this, everyone tends to think it must be a brown recluse spider, but there has never actually been a recorded sighting of this spider in Hawai‘i. The Islands are known to harbor the related Mediterranean recluse, but it doesn’t cause the same level of reaction. Watch the KHON coverage.