A Falmouth, N.S., woman is nursing a painful wildlife bite, but she’s not entirely sure where it came from.
Lily Doubleday says she was in the garden with a friend when she noticed a small inflammation that seemed to be growing.
"She said, 'What's that on your leg?'” says Doubleday. “I looked and I said, ‘I don't know. It stings though.'”
What began as a tiny red spot got worse through the night. By morning, Doubleday says the pain was unbearable.
“I can't put a bedsheet on it. I can't lay it on anything because the sting," she says.
Doctors agreed it was some kind of bite, but they're not sure from what.
“They don't really know how to treat it,” says Angela Williams-Smith, Doubleday’s daughter. “Besides antibiotics, if it’s not an infection, it's a reaction to the bite, what is antibiotics doing?"
A man from Middle Cornwall, N.S., received a similar bite earlier in August from a brown recluse spider, which are native to southwest United States. It’s believed the spider arrived in a bag of fruit.
Experts say there are a number of stinging and biting insects in the Maritimes that could have been responsible, but this bite unusual.
"There are no spiders native to Nova Scotia that are dangerous to humans in a medical sense,” says Calum Ewing, director of operations at the Nova Scotia Museum.
Doubleday says she’s never been the type of person to step on a spider, and even after this incident, she still won’t be unnecessarily killing them.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Bruce Frisko.