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Category Archives: Species

<3 Bugs, h8 Spiders

Warning: big old spider picture BOO!

Rick Vetter, the quotable spider guy who keeps tabs on the brown widows (spreading) and brown recluses (nonexistent) of Southern California, has a fun article in American Entomologist. The topic sounds as if it was born from a lifetime of forehead-slapping: why are there spider-hating entomologists? An entomologist studies insects, and I know spiders aren’t insects. Still, you’d think professional courtesy at the very least would cause entomologists not to indulge in any of the hyperventilating, car-wrecking, weapons-fetching behavior you see on the Internet when some schmo encounters a spider.

Like the lady in this picture at right. Ooo, sour face.

Shelly Albrow's 15 minutes of fame: she saw a harmless spider. It was ON THE FLOOR.

Shelly Albrow’s 15 minutes of fame: she saw a harmless spider. It was ON THE FLOOR. #ohthehumanity

The British press rose to the occasion in gaudiest fashion by relaying her encounter with the Beast of Orpington (I made that up), “a deadly spider.” You know the drill. Somebody freaks out about Steatoda nobilis, an insignificant spider that’s somehow been dubbed Britain’s Most Venomous. But cor and blimey, just look at this photo and consult with Dr. Internet: if this is a Steatoda nobilis, I’m Tobey Maguire. And I’m not.

The Beast of Orpington.

The Beast of Orpington.

This (left) is a picture Ms. Albrow took of the monster, a harmless grass spider most likely, but let’s frighten a few more Brits and call it maybe a wolf spider! (owOOOoooooooo)

Anyway, Vetter found a number of entomologist colleagues who admit to fear and loathing of spiders. One hates spiders but works with maggots for a living and thinks they’re adorable:

This respondent is fully aware of the paradox of this spider-hating, maggot-friendly situation, but concluded an e-mail with “maggots don’t sneak up on you and jump in your hair.”

Often there was a Childhood Incident (tell me about having a family of brothers, I know). Vetter writes, “One entomologist mentioned that while her dislike of spiders is minor, her brother is highly arachnophobic, which ‘comes in handy sometimes.’ “ Several mentioned running into those big orb webs that go up overnight, in which the poor, hardworking arachnid has settled in with a few meager breakfast bugs and somebody face-blunders right into her work. One scientist had a bad dream about being snared by a human-sized spider.

One guy had a Cheiracanthium run all over his face and into his nostrils while he was driving. OK, he gets a pass.

Vetter admits the numbers aren’t representative. Nor is the Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (an actual psychological tool) well-tailored to his research:

When I (or other arachnologists with no spider fear) take the questionnaire, our score is 14 as opposed to the expected score of zero because we give the highest “totally agree” response to two statements (“Currently, I am sometimes on the lookout for spiders,” “I now think a lot about spiders”), but for completely opposite reasons than those of an arachnophobe. Personally, I probably think about spiders every waking hour of the day.

Me, too!

All academic articles should be written this way. First, a pretty chart showing just what the respondents have against spiders. Oingo Boingo (“Insects,” from “Nothing to Fear,” 1982) was right: it’s because they have too many legs! Also they scuttle. And surprise you.

Ugly, but not filthy. Silent, but not deadly. Feared most for "the way they move." I'm never going to dance again.

Ugly, but not filthy. Silent, but not deadly. Feared most for “the way they move.” I’m never going to dance again.

Then there’s an amazing chart showing how the respondents rank a whole zoo of animals on a like-dislike scale. Spiders and ticks bring up the rear:

No, I don't know what an earwing is either. Cuter than an eel, at any rate.

No, I don’t know what an earwing is either. Cuter than an eel, at any rate.

It’s a fun read. Bonus points for finding the words “jeebies” and “willies.”

I want to learn more about arachnophobia. There’s been a lot of research, but it’s still mysterious. Why are lots of people in certain countries afraid of spiders, but not as many in other places? Why would evolution select for arachnophobia, if it did, when spiders barely matter as threats to life and health? Why aren’t people terrified of mosquitoes and flies, which really are little mass-murdering bastids? And again—I think spiders are quite attractive, but even if you didn’t, why would you like maggots better?

 

As Easy as Herding Tarantulas

Let’s go on a spider safari

This one goes out to all you screamers who won’t pick up a spider in a paper cup and put it outside. In case it, you know, leaps for your throat or lays eggs in your hairdo or something else that happens all the time.

In South Africa, a road-widening project ground to a halt last year when workers found a bunch of baboon spider burrows in the way. The two species encountered, Augacephalus junodi and Ceratogyrus darlingi, are protected, so the spiders had to be relocated.

Helloooo, Blondie. Augacephalus junodi, the golden baboon spider, had to pick up stakes when the road came through.

Helloooo, Blondie. Augacephalus junodi, the golden baboon spider, had to pick up stakes when the road came through.

Augacephalus is one of the most beautiful species names ever. Auga refers to the rays of the sun and cephalus means head; the pattern on this spider’s cephalothorax looks like a big, golden sunburst. Ceratogyrus has a little horn.

Baboon spiders are tarantulas. Hairy, hefty. They even sound big, though by tarantula standards they’re not especially. Tarantula hobbyists like to show them off, which means the populations are at risk from the illegal pet trade.

So did the road workers all faint in unison at the prospect of herding tarantulas?

Of course not: South Africans, folks! they’re tough. They wrestle lions before breakfast. Instead the workers, advised by a team of scientists, rounded up the big spiders by rooting them out of their burrows and collecting them by hand. Out of 400 spiders relocated (cue “Kingdom of the Spiders” footage, hello Bill Shatner), only two of them bit anybody, and the game-reserve adviser on the project shrugged it off with, “It is like a bee sting.”

A scientist (you can tell, only scientists wear wristwatches anymore) shows one of the relocated baboon spiders  around her new digs. New burrow holes were dug with an auger, with grass and such added for curb appeal.

A scientist (you can tell, only scientists wear wristwatches anymore) shows one of the relocated baboon spiders around her new digs. New burrow holes were dug with an auger, with grass and such added for curb appeal.

I love this place! Then the team dug hundreds of artificial burrows for this shy, retiring animal, which lives most of its life in the same hole in the ground. The refugee spiders accepted the carefully located new burrows, which featured moistened soil and a scattering of plant material outside for shelter. The project turned out so well that other construction projects in South Africa started sending their spiders to the new habitat, too. Adjust your safari plans accordingly.

A side note: I’m sure you’ve noticed how eager energy companies are to trumpet their environmental credentials. These spider wranglers worked for a South African mining concern called Exxaro, which was widening a road to a power plant. I know nothing of their record and of course this story makes them look good—especially the part where some of the spiders set up housekeeping in a pile of ash next to another coal-fired power plant. Still, if oil companies can pass themselves off as cormorant-hugging do-gooders, I suppose this mining concern can use tarantulas as spokes-spiders for sustainability. After all, they coulda just squished them.

Ah, that new-home smell. Hope the neighbors are friendly.

Ah, that new-home smell. Hope the neighbors are friendly.

 
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Posted by on August 20, 2013 in Spider science, Tarantulas

 

Justice for the Brown Recluse?

Don’t Fear the Creeper

Great news—a scientist and a doctor are teaming up to develop a test to detect brown-recluse venom.

Why is this a big deal? If you’re a fan of facts, you’ll know. The brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) has a mythical persona far bigger and more menacing than the arachnid itself. It’s the go-to spider when people suffer a skin insult and need to blame a bug. It doesn’t matter if the recluse didn’t do the deed—or even if the recluse doesn’t live in the same state as the invisible biter—this particular spider gets the rap.

At least until you admit your guitar player died of something a little sadder, like liver failure.

Lately the fact-finders of the spider world are getting a little traction, at last, for the idea that “spider bite” is a weak diagnosis for mystery lesions. People are gradually letting it sink in that staph, lice, ticks, ants, mosquitoes, even diabetes can cause medically significant skin problems, too.

Still, the Invisible Spider stalks the internet in every bloggy tale of a gardener with a red bump that oozed and ached and required serious frowns from every doctor in the county. I’ll leave it to the folklorists and anthropologists and psychologists to explain why we have this instinct to blame spiders for every affront. Perhaps, in the immortal words of Oingo Boingo, “they’ve got too many legs.”

Once bitten, not shy: the tarantella gave thousands of costumed European folk an excuse to go footloose and defy social convention. (From "Stomp: A History of Disco and Invertebrates")

Once bitten, not shy: the tarantella gave thousands of colorfully garbed barefoot Europeans an excuse to go footloose and defy social convention. (From “Stomp: A History of Disco and Invertebrates”)

. . . Except for the tarantella dance—anybody can see why dancing deliriously and merrily groping your fellow rustics would be a big hit. Yes, officer, the spider made me twerk.

That’s why an actual medical test for a brown recluse bite could be such a big leap. First for the patient—since spider bite diagnosis is so scattershot, so are the treatments. Are antibiotics required? Steroids? Excision? Just clean the wound and rest? Why is my “spider bite” showing evidence of MRSA or other infection—is that somehow conveyed by a spider? The above-mentioned article from Wayne County, Missouri, a place where brown recluses actually do reside, quotes the test’s co-developer as saying he knew of a child being unsuccessfully treated for brown-recluse bite when in fact she had a life-threatening infection. She died.

A venom test could clear the way to standardized, effective treatment and diminished threat to public health. Doctors can be dummkopfs, too:

A study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine in 2007 found that South Carolina doctors diagnosed 738 brown recluse spider bites in 2004. However, since 1953 only 44 brown recluse specimens have been verified from six South Carolina counties.

But I’m also hoping the venom test will strike a blow for fact appreciation. It’s not good to walk around sweating bullets about non-threats. Not just spiders. If we can train ourselves to pay attention to careful science and swat away ignorant loudmouths, we can play a better hand in reality-based life. We’ll stop recoiling from spiders or vaccines or Happy Meals toys.


 

 

Guest Post: Check out the Peacock Spider!

Rainbow afro circus time! Maratus volans photo by Dr. Jurgen Otto

Rainbow afro circus time! Maratus volans photo by Dr. Jurgen Otto

 

Today, Tru wants to chat about a recent spider discovery:

 

Note: Information from Wikipedia article, Maratus volans.

 

If you see spiders which just aren’t that attractive or you’re just bored of, well this spider is NOT for you. This spider is called the Peacock (or gliding spider) or in Latin, Maratus volans. It is a species of jumping spider.

It is confined in Australia. Octavius Pickard-Cambridge (I think the discoverer) noted in his original description, “It is difficult to describe adequately the great beauty coloring of this spider” because it has a unusual trait of having flap-like extensions on its abdomen which rise upward to get ahold of the attention of the girl peacock. While approaching, the male vibrates and begins its groovy dance. If the female doesn’t like the male, she’ll eat him. They reach to about 5 mm in the length of the body. Maratus volans means “flying” in latin. There’s an urban myth that they can fly, but it’s not true.

Thanks for reading Spiderhugger™

Article by: Truman Lindsey

 

(P.S.: Here’s the link to the amazing, unbelievable, indeed groovy dance of the peacock spider, as narrated by Dr. Jurgen Otto)

 
 

A Buncha Baby Spiders

No, you don’t get a “trigger warning”

Here’s a peek inside the nursery of a local Steatoda grossa mom, who has wisely walked away from this clutch of little ankle-biters. No, not terribly maternal — but she does usually stick around with the egg sac for a while, even if she doesn’t go in for college savings accounts or after-school enrichment. The only reason she’s not in view here is that I let her go after a few days’ captivity. This is another of my clumsy attempts to take macro photographs (I hope to take a class this summer and really figure out what I’m doing.)

When the silk's astray, the spiderlings will play.

When the silk’s astray, the spiderlings will play.

Steatoda grossa, as I’ve written about before, is a common garden species around these parts and well-traveled elsewhere. She’s related to the black widow and looks similar enough that you might have hopped around in a panic if you upended an old flowerpot or pair of garden gloves and sent her scurrying out. Well … “scurrying” is pushing it. She’s slow and awkward on foot, graceful only on the web. And she’ll be trying like hell to make for the nearest crevice or hole. If you catch her out in the open and she decides all is lost, she’ll crumple up and look dead, a technique that works for much bigger creatures, up to a point … let’s call that the “possum on the yellow line” point. Let her be and she’ll slowly unfold and skitter off. (Skittering, scurrying … what’s your favorite spider verb?)

The proud parent. Dim lighting means she can easily pass for a widow, right?

The proud parent. Dim lighting means she can easily pass for a widow, right?

There’s a very specific place in my domain where Steatoda likes to hang out, and I find it interesting. We have a mealworm ranch in the basement. They started out as gecko fodder, then they were for the songbirds, and now my entrepreneurial boy — Steve Jobs 2.0 — is launching a mealworm business and is hounding a local pet store to take us on as a supplier. Locally sourced food is all the rage, do we not know? He’s designed the containers, come up with a name, and launched on Facebook. I never realized mealworms, technically larvae of darkling beetles (Tenebrio molitor), were both so universally delicious and so astoundingly fertile. Or maybe we’re just good at invertebrates . . .

Anyway, though the larva is all Chez Panisse to everybody, the adult form, the beetle, is not. Clumsy little black bugs, easily overturned, spared an early death because of being so darkling … or something. Neither gecko nor bird will deign to try them. But Steatoda, as it turns out, does love the beetles. Every time we tidy up the mealworm ranch or change containers there’s a cobwebby superstructure in and around the boxes, occupied with lots of fat glossy spiders and the leftovers of recent meals. It was scary the first time, since it appeared we were breeding black widows and even our placid neighbors would have arisen with flaming torches if they’d known that. But a closer inspection showed them to be Steatoda, who is more accustomed to misidentification than the average arachnid, and who does not bother us.

Still, I like to gather up these false widows and put them outside, where there are old pots and leaf litter aplenty. The brood pictured above were placed in the corner of a raised planter bed to fend for themselves. I expect to see them again.

 

Zoropsis Raids the Refrigerator

“I heard my wife screaming”

That’s always a great way to start a spider story (thank you, Courier.co.uk), and sadly typical. This unhappy couple were keening over the discovery of a cold, sluggish spider in their refrigerator, which Scottish newshounds lost no time in identifying as an “Indian wolf spider” because it was found huddled near some imported grapes. I knew this guy right away, and so will you if you click that tab on the right that says “Zoropsis.” Yep, this looks like our good friend Zoro, this time caught in a Scottish icebox without his kilt.

Aye, cold it is in Scotland, colder still the reception!

Aye, ’tis cold in Scotland; colder still the reception!

“This spider could give a nasty bite but thankfully no one was harmed,” says an animal-control officer on no evidence whatsoever. You’d have to be off yer haggis to think Zoropsis spinimana was ever going to harm anybody. Bite? I don’t know, if you poked him in the face he might take that amiss. But these rugged Scots, equipped with all their spider-avoidance equipment, didn’t need to worry about that anyway. Thank god, again, for manly Scotsmen who stave off the beasties while their women find time first to scream and then to call the tabloids. (I’m saying “him,” but I can’t tell from this angle if the spider has the characteristic male palpal structures. I was joking about the kilt, but too bad it’s not as easy as hoisting one’s garments to tell a spider’s sex.)

Yeah, but it is pretty easy to rule it out as a “wolf spider.” Just because it’s brown? And patterned? Let’s call anything that has fur a … let’s see … I know, let’s call it a DOG. Good working hypothesis, until we get an actual expert to bear down on the question, which in this case will be never.

And I like this, um, expert who opines that you can tell it’s a weird spider because “unlike house spiders, its eyes are at the front of its head.” Forward-facing eyes, who knew? Don’t let all the other tens of thousands of spider species hear about this, they’ll be wanting forward-facing eyes, too!

And lo, you don’t even need to don your pith helmet and steam off to India to find Zoro’s family: that tricky Internet thing shows that Zoropsis–known for spreading beyond its Mediterranean range, including to the San Francisco Bay Area–is already established here and there in Britain. So brave up, Braveheart, and say hi to Zoro.

 

 
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Posted by on March 25, 2013 in Zoropsis

 

Spider makes its own piñata

The artists among the Cyclosa community — those small orb-weaving spiders, known for decorating their webs with trash — are getting better. At least in one corner of Peruvian rainforest, where someone with an ecotourism company spotted this tiny sculptor having an exhibition at roughly eye level. Now, the trash-line spiders have long been observed cluttering up their homes purposefully. It’s not that they’re lousy housekeepers. It seems that if you compile a, well, pile of dead bugs and other debris you might attract more predators, but those predators will have a lesser chance of picking you out among the junk. Smart, those spiders. What you call a strategy of pre-emption.

But this photo by Phil Torres of Rainforest Expeditions is yet more marvelous. Walking among the brush, Torres spotted what he thought was a live spider wiggling and twisting in a web. But it looked off … flaky and dried-out. As well it should, since it was made of bits of leaf and bug body parts. The actual spider was right nearby, tinier than its mummy, and it apparently was giving the web a twang now and then to make the scarecrow move about realistically. Torres found multiple members of this still-unidentified species not far away.

The artist atop its creation. Good show, Cyclosa! © Phil Torres

The artist atop its creation. Good show, Cyclosa! (© Phil Torres)

As much as I love to anthropomorphize, I know this small creature wasn’t thinking of Day of the Dead flair as it did its work. In fact, for all the amusement and fascination this image is sparking on the internet, it’s not clear that there was anything deliberate in the spider-shaped accretion. The silk lines do happen to converge there, spiders like to sit where the lines meet, and it’s possible the junk collection merely overflowed. Still, other Cyclosa research has shown that those who tend to make decoys usually build them about the same size as their bodies, which is interesting. If these spiders have an instinct for making scarecrows (scarespiders?), the legs are a natural next step. (Other photos on the site show effigies with eight legs, a realistic touch that really gives you pause). I like the contrast between the big, spooky decoy and the brisk, tiny spider doing the work.

If spiders can travel in space, I guess they can make piñatas too.

 

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2012 in Cyclosa (small orb weavers)

 

Ground control to Major Charlotte . . .

One giant leap for spiderkind – a lot of leaps, actually

The universe’s most well-traveled spider, a Phidippus johnsoni with the grand name of Nefertiti, died recently in what was supposed to be her quiet retirement home. Reporters made much of how this chunky, red-and-black jumper not only thrived in her 100 days aboard the International Space Station but withstood the rigors of launch, re-entry, and being shuttled about the country with apparent good grace. Nefertiti seems to have reached the end of her brief natural lifespan in the warm confines of an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Spiders have the right stuff, forgive me trotting out that phrase. They’re focused, efficient, and as taciturn as any Neil Armstrong. This particular arachnaut, a regular Sally Ride, had a simple mission that she performed with grace and energy: catching flies. And the wondrous thing: she did it in zero gravity, an environment no earthly spider could be expected to grasp. Think of those millions of years of earthbound instincts, honed to an unimagineable degree … and yet this jumping spider was all feh, I can do this—I’ll just adjust the trajectory here and the thrust there, disregard millennia of sensory input, and boom: bug soup.

What next! Spiders from Mars? Oh. Carry on then, Ziggy.

I don’t think any old spider could have done it. Jumping spiders are the brains of the outfit. Equipped with sophisticated, unblinking, networked cameras around their little heads, they see and hunt famously well. They’ve been observed sneaking up on prey that they can’t even see, calculating how to creep up under cover and burst out at just the right instant. It would be like you stalking a pizza delivery guy walking along on the other side of a tall fence, figuring out when he’s going to stop and tie his shoe or check his text messages, pursuing him around the corner, and then out you pop through a loose board and snatch his pie. Yep, it takes thought.

Nefertiti got her ticket to ride thanks to an 18-year-old Egyptian named Amr Mohamed, who won the YouTube Spacelab contest with his idea for a jumping-spider experiment. (There was a second arachnaut, a zebra-striped Salticus scenicus named Cleopatra, but alas, she died in orbit.) Once aloft, astronaut Suni Williams took the spiders under her wing and blogged about them. She remarked about Nefertiti: “She is sort of scary. I am so glad I am not a fruit fly. I opened up the habitat and actually saw her running around at full speed looking for something to eat. It was difficult to even get a steady picture.”

What, no Tang? Nefertiti is hungry, and she’s looking at you.

Watch her do it. It’s funny how earthlike it looks. She does that classic Salticid prowl, but I think she’s hanging on to the surface a bit more consciously, as astronauts do. Can’t see it, but surely she’s letting out a silk dragline before the leap to reel herself back in if she misses. But jumping spiders always do that on earth, too.

Nefertiti was not the first spider in space. Experiments involving zero-G web building by spiders also took place aboard Skylab (that’s old-school space program, kiddies), on the space station twice before, and on the shuttle Columbia. Australian high-school students designed Columbia’s science module to see whether eight garden-variety orb spiders could do their weaving and hunting jobs in space. Those spiders perished when Columbia was destroyed during re-entry in 2003.

Until recently, a brave little website by the Glen Waverley Secondary College devoted to that aborted spider experiment was still archived on the web, drifting forlornly through cyberspace. The tab labeled “Results” was blank.

But there’s more to that story, and not really about spiders but about science and humans. Most of the spider data was lost along with the shuttle and its crew, but spacecraft did fly again. The teenagers who planned that experiment with such care resolved to let their work stand as homage to the people who venture into space. There will be other experiments, schoolchildren will dream them up, and other lives long and short will be entwined into the struggle to find Big Picture answers in the warm earth and the cold silence of space.

In 2011 two golden orb-weaving spiders preceded Nefertiti on the International Space Station, delivered via shuttle Endeavour in its last flight, and put in more than two months in another web-building experiment. Only one survived the return trip, and it obliquely offered aspiring scientists and teachers a lesson in humility.

Details matter in science and spaceflight, often to a poignant degree. The students, amid their extremely detailed preparations, had named this arachnaut Gladys. Back on earth, she was determined to be a he.

Henceforth the returned traveler was called Gladstone.

 

 

Averse to the brown widow?

I’m told that my last posting, about the arrival of the brown widow spider in Southern California, was at least two lattes short of creative. So, to fix.

Ahem.

 

FANFARE FOR THE COMMON SPIDER

 

Glossy and brown

Upside down

Comes the chocolate widow to town

 

Fresh from the south

Fangs in her mouth

Preens in the moonlight while hanging around

 

New Latrodectus

Oh, Orkin, protect us!

Just kidding—she has a most timid prospectus

 

Toward people who tread

Past the woodpile or shed

In a bug-eating-bug world can’t even detect us

 

Bite like a bee

Likely to flee

Nothing to threaten your mortality

 

Snug in your planter

Oust her? You can’t. Her

Presence is likely indefinitely.

 

Actually, we’re more inclined to limericks.

 
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Posted by on October 29, 2012 in Latrodectus (widows)

 

Meet the spider: Latrodectus geometricus

How the West was widowed

Who says there’s nothing new under the sun? It’s certainly not true in sunny Southern California, land of novelty. Recently there was a modest flurry of news activity about the brown widow (Latrodectus geometricus), and the inroads this species has made in the Southland. Good science here, not rumor or Netlore, thanks to the work of the tireless Rick Vetter, recently retired UC-Riverside arachnologist, who has led brown widow surveys for some years and is the go-to guy for quotes about this critter.

What happens when the brown menace bites? “Mostly, nothing happens,” he tells the Los Angeles Times.

Seriously? Not even at Halloween?

The brown widow (not to be confused with the brown recluse, which is not native to California, at least the reality-based parts of our fair state) seems to have come out of nowhere. Black widows we’ve always had in abundance. The bulbous ladies of the night have long monopolized the venomous-beastie role all over the state and the West (it’s right there in the name, Latrodectus hesperus). In fact, black widows hiding in table grapes are estimated to be our No. 2 export, right behind Realtors.

Now the brown widows appear to be taking over black-widow turf. And so brazen! Black widows are secretive, hunkering down in woodpiles and crevices and pipes and other sheltered spots. Brown widows, on the other hand, will merrily set up shop under patio furniture, playground swings, the rim of potted plants. Black widows are literally yielding the field.

The new widow in town is brown.

Here’s a photo—long in detail but short of focus—of a brown widow awaiting a meal in a Santa Ana backyard. It’s interesting to observe that classic widow profile and posture but on a spider of a different color. Mature brown widows wear a handsome khaki base color overlain with swirling pale designs on their upper abdomens. Their legs are banded and their hourglass badge is closer in color to a safety-orange than to the expected throbbing red. Even an amateur can identify one telltale sign of their presence: a milky-white egg sac shaped not like a cotton puff but like those round, spiky Japanese candies. They also look like the studded floating mines in an old submarine movie.

This night of the photo was a veritable widow convention: dozens of them lurking and dangling amid paving stones, the walls of raised beds, a chain-link fence, and the leaves of the household tomato garden. And not a single L. hesperus to be seen.

The geometric widow made a dandy news story, for several reasons. One, any spidery story sets a reporter’s heart a-thumping. And a spider actually venomous—twice good. But thrice was an angle you never see in ordinary coverage: the brown widow represented a decrease in perceived spider danger. How so? Again, it’s the venom: apparently the brown widow’s juice is less bad than the black widow’s. Or the spider injects less poison. Or it’s even less willing to bite than L. hesperus, which is saying something. So the news coverage had this wacky drama/comedy two-facedness, wherein reporters had to announce that this spooky new spider was spreading throughout SoCal while pointing out that it was giving black-hatted L. hesperus the boot.

Huh. Balance.

Well, I won’t let down my guard, not yet. Now that the brown widow has made the nightly news, balance or not, it’s time for half-heard information about its arrival to be distorted and waved around. There Will Be Bites—not necessarily real bites, but more of those unwitnessed, fantastic lesions blamed on the growing corps of Invisible Spiders, now with an L. geometricus battalion. People of a certain bent will stop blaming brown recluses or hobo spiders once their kids discover Snopes and tell them to stop being silly, but they’ll shift their panic over to the brown widow. Just watch.

 

 
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Posted by on October 26, 2012 in Envenomation, Latrodectus (widows), Netlore