Luvkitty33
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2007
- Posts
- 754
graceanne said:Um, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but . . .
black widow spiders are shy and prefer dark, damp areas. They only bite if they feel you are threatening their egg sac. It's more likely a brown widow.
Here's some links to sites on black widows:
http://www.desertusa.com/july97/du_bwindow.html (scroll down to behavior)
http://www.pestproducts.com/blackwid.htm
"The female black widow spider rarely leaves her web. The web she constructs is an irregular, tangled, cris-cross web of rather coarse silk. The core of the web is almost funnel shaped, woven into a silken tunnel in which the female spider spends the majority of her daylight hours. This web is altered and rebuilt in a regular basis and is capable of capturing rather large insects. The female wraps any captured prey with her silk, repeatedly turning her victim with her legs as she applies more silk. After her victim is covered in silk, the spider kills her prey by injecting her venom. The prey might be eaten immediately or reserved for a later feeding. After the prey is fed upon and the body fluids are sucked from the victim, the carcass is cut loose and allowed to drop to the ground. The female black widow is most often found hanging upside down in her web, where she spends most of her daytime hours. She stays close to her egg mass, defensively biting anything that disturbs her or her egg sac.
Oh, and fyi - male black widows are not poisonous. They don't even look like the females. Here's a picture of both the male and female black widow.
Thanks for the links, Graceanne!! Those pics so creep me out, though! I keep feeling things crawling on me now, LOL!!
Anyway, I'm sure we have both the male and females in our house. The females are very obviously black widows though because they're so shiny and black with that big butt. Sometimes we've seen the red hourglass, but usually we can tell by the color and shape.
They are usually not out in the open at our house. They love to hide in the wood of our antique piano, behind this box that's against the wall, and we recently found them hiding underneath a lamp....inside the base of it. We've seen a few babies lately, too, but I was relieved to read in the article that you linked to that the babies are not poisonous.
Apparently, there are brown widows too that ARE poisonous, but the male black widows are not. That was an interesting fact I learned in the article, too.
All I can say is that they give me the MAJOR creeps!!!! Just looking at the pictures in the article I think is going to cause spider nightmares tonight!! *shivers*
That was bloody brilliant! LOL