Common Wellington Spiders: Are They Dangerous & How to Control Them

Whether you’re clearing dense webs off exterior light fittings or spotting a whitetail roaming across the hallway, dealing with spiders is a common reality for Wellington homeowners. While most local species are harmless, having them take over your living space creates unwanted clutter and peace-of-mind concerns. In this guide, we’ll look at common Wellington spider species, where they hide, bite risks to watch out for, and how to keep your home spider-free.

Common Spider Species Found in Wellington Homes

While we Wellingtonians, like most New Zealanders, have a massive assortment of spiders living in our region, most of them will go unnoticed. The exceptions are spiders that either live in our homes or in close proximity to them. The most common ones we will see are:

• Black Tunnel Web Spider:
  • These guys can be rather scary looking. They have thick, shiny black legs and a bulbous, hairy black abdomen.
  • Their head is a shiny reddish-brown with large black fangs. Most often, it is the males we see wandering about, looking for a mate.
• Sheet Web Spider:
  • A yellow and brown spider with a fairly skinny body.
  • Whilst they are less common indoors, they will often be found in covered entryways. Just like the Tunnel Web spider, we see more male Sheet Web spiders wandering around our homes.
  • The largest species of Sheet Webs can have a leg span as big as the palm of your hand.
• Grey House Spider & Black House Spider:
  • A lot smaller than the previously mentioned spiders, they are grey and brown in colour and up to 15mm in length.
  • They are most often the culprits for webs in the corner of windows, around exterior lights, and those webs in your car wing mirror.
  • These poor little guys are also a favourite food source for White Tail spiders.
• White Tail Spiders:
  • Arguably the most feared spider in Wellington.
  • They are black and grey in colour with shiny brown legs, and we can’t forget the white patch at the end of their abdomen that gives them their name.
  • They are nomadic spiders, mostly wandering while hunting for food, often in the form of other unfortunate spiders. They will only spin a web when they are laying eggs to protect their young.
• Daddy Long-legs Spider:
  • Tiny bodies with disproportionately long legs are the easiest way to describe their appearance.
  • They will live up in the corners of rooms near ceilings or up in the corners of cupboards.
  • Unlike the well-told myth that whitetails get their powers from eating these guys, it is closer to the truth to say they are a formidable opponent to white-tail spiders and are very adept at catching whatever creature wanders into their webs using their long legs as an advantage.

Where Spiders Hide Around Your Wellington Home

Whilst different species of spider have their own preference of habitat, they all have a few common needs: water, food, and shelter. It’s a pretty simple list, and our homes and gardens provide all three in abundance:

• Subfloors & Crawl Spaces: I’ve spent a lot of time under houses and have laid eyes on many different species of spiders in the darkness under floorboards. The subfloor creates a cave-like environment, dark and humid mostly. When there is any rubble or old building materials down there, Tunnel Webs will love it, and Daddy Long-legs will make a vast array of cobwebs hanging from floor joists and bearers.
• Exterior Lighting: Any light source visible from outside your home will draw in flying insects at night, supplying a feast for spiders. The gaps and crevices in outside lights are where spiders will build their webs, waiting to ensnare that juicy moth or fly. Implementing targeted fly control around outdoor lighting drastically reduces this primary food source.
• Trees & Vegetation: Whilst trees and shrubs anywhere on a property will also provide the three staples for spider comfort, it’s when these are close to or up against a house that they can create a problem. The branches of plants make the perfect frame to support webs, and as with any vegetation, there will be an absolute smorgasbord of bugs attracted to them, perfect for many species of spiders that lay in wait for their food.
• Indoor Hideouts: Inside our homes, the menu will be a lot less than what is on the table outside. This doesn’t mean there isn’t enough food for spiders; there will always be some sort of bug traversing through your home, and spiders like the daddy long-legs can wait a long time. It’s the species that hunt other spiders or are vagrant feeders that we see moving around more inside, like White Tail spiders. It’s the dark, out-of-reach places inside that most spiders will choose to live, like structural cavities, wardrobes, and cupboards.

Are Wellington Spiders Dangerous? (Bite Risks & Property Damage)

• Ecosystem Role: For a lot of people, spiders are just another thing we live with and are worth having around. After all, they catch flies and other bugs, though certainly not all of them. They also play an important part in local ecosystems as tasty morsels for birds and even other spiders.
• Cosmetic & Property Issues: Arachnophobia is not the only reason we call spiders a pest, though. There is also the cosmetic side of having spiders around and the things they can interfere with. Spider webs covering your home are unsightly, and they can cause issues with security cameras by blocking the camera view. Even some faults in smoke detectors can be attributed to tiny spiders making themselves at home inside them.
• Bite Risks & Danger: We have got a few spiders from our neighbours in Australia, and even our native Tunnel Webs look a lot like the Sydney Funnel Web which is extremely dangerous. Though in Wellington, we are lucky we haven’t inherited their deadly spiders. This isn’t to say there is no risk from what we have here; we can, however, say the danger of a spider bite is low.
• Bite Symptoms: Thousands of species can inflict bites on humans and will do so when defending themselves. Spider bites happen when we handle spiders, they get stuck in our clothing, or when we roll over on them in our sleep. Bites aren’t always painful at the time, but the list of symptoms can be long: minor swelling and itchiness, headaches, nausea, dizziness, and infected sores. Although less common, in some cases these sores are further infected, becoming necrotic.

Effective Spider Control & Treatment Solutions

The good news is we have options to control spiders in and around your home without harming the local ecosystem:

• Targeted Exterior Treatments: With careful selection of treatment agents and correct application methods, we can do targeted exterior treatments to get rid of spiders that live outside and reduce food availability for vagrant feeders like White Tail spiders.
• Indoor Repellent Barriers: For any spiders living inside, we treat selected areas to form a repellent barrier to keep them out—safe for families and pets, but bad news for spiders.

If you are dealing with persistent webs or roaming spiders, explore our full range of all pest services, schedule professional spider control, or contact us today for friendly advice from our local Wellington pest control team.