Black Widow

The spider Latrodectus, more commonly known as a black widow, is found throughout most of the Western Hemisphere.  In my view, black widows are the creepiest-looking spider around.  They are unearthly shiny and cold.  The forelegs of a black widow seem to almost telescope as they tap along their webs.  Their webs are chaotic and often cluttered with the dismantled bodies of bugs they have captured and killed.

They are junk collectors.

The black widow earned that name because oftentimes the female will kill her much smaller male partner after mating.  And the venom of a black widow is 15 times more potent than that of a rattlesnake.  Fortunately, these spiders prefer quiet and dark corners.  They are not social and not particularly adventurous.   In the fall, I often find one or two hammocked between the rake and shovel handles in my garage, preparing to overwinter.

I once bellied deep into the crawl space of a house while working (as an electrician) and found myself surrounded by more than a dozen black widows suspended in ugly webs all around me.   As luck would have it, my trouble light blinked-out just as I scuttled into this firmament of spiders.  I screamed at my partner to tape a new bulb to my cord.  I cautiously fished the new bulb toward me, fired it up, quickly finished my work, and then drove back to tell my boss he would need to fire me before ever sending me back to that place again.

I was serious.

The black widow is threat enough to workers that OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) publishes a fact sheet about the spider for workers likely to encounter them.

On Sunday last, I opened my door to let 40 pounds of cat outside and found a black widow clinging to the bottom of the door along with a few fragments of leaf in her web.  I did not kill her.  Instead, I coaxed her onto a wooden dowel and carried her out for release into the wild bunchgrass.  I took a picture of her before letting her go.       

--Mitchell Hegman