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black widow spiders

Y

yoz's friend

Joined
Jun 30, 2001
Messages
1,751
what is the range of the black widow. i always thought they only live in warm climates but my friend told me there are black widows in ny state.i've never seen one.
 
The black widow that has the tell tale hour glass on the ventral(belly) side is the species Latrodectus mactans(southern widow), usually residing in the southern United States, but I don't think one ranging as far north as New York is completely unrealistic. There is another species of widow much more common in the northern US that ranges from Canada all the way down the east coast, and that is Latrodectus variolus(northern widow). This species has an hourglass shape that can be discerned on the dorsal side of the abdomen. There are Latrodectus species pretty much across the entire US.
 
Evan THanks for the informative answer.. Perhaps the map includes the range of the entire family
 
It does. There are 31 Latrodectus species around the world. They are all toxic to a painful, rarely fatal, degree.
 
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Don't know which variety is what, but I occasionally kill a black widow with the red hourglass here in northern Utah. We get some fairly cold winters & snow.
Denis
 
Just remember, the Black Widow will not always have that classic hourglass. Sometimes the hourglass becomes deformed to the point of just being several small, red specks. I have a friend who is an exterminator and he showed me a really big one last year found in an outside rat bait trap, the type you see inside and outside of warehouses. He has found a lot of Widows in those traps and they sometimes kill the large field mice that enter the trap, too.

Anyway, this one was very big and found in early winter outside in one of the traps. Beautiful, gloss black abdomen that was as large as a marble.
 
They are in NYS. About 15 years ago I was walking through some woods on Long Island just after a hatch - little babies all over the place and the momma was hanging out trailside. I was freaking out and praying to the inventor of DEET to see me through.
 
I'm 43,i have seen zero till the past 3 years,they are every where here,city country....................
 
You may just have become aware of where to look for them. You tend to see them in poorly ventilated spaces like sheds and so forth. I keep an eye peeled when in house crawl spaces, but have never seen one in that environment.

Remember the male is a much smaller spider. It bites too.
 
find a lot of them in pool skimmers down in virginia and they have the hourglass shape usually. we used to have some in our warehouse that looked just like black widows- same size, shape, etc but were a high gloss super dark burgandy/ brown. almost black but with a hint of reddish to them and they had a line not an hourglass on them. anyone know what it is and if its venomous?
 
Chuck, there are species of spiders known commonly as False widows, they belong to the genus Steatoda. Quite a few of them look like black widows if you are just catching a glimpse of them. Latrodectus variolus can have what looks like a red line down its back. Steatoda are harmless, but all Latrodectus species are highly toxic. Let me also correct something I mentioned earlier, the L. variolus does have an hourglass on the underside of the abdomen and was a hasty description on my part. It differs from the southern widows hourglass in that it is usually broken. This is in addition to the red spotting or stripes on the dorsal side of the abdomen, I apologize for any confusion that may have caused.
 
I have a big female I keep as a pet. They are all over around the outside of my house. I decided to keep this one because she was the biggest and best looking I ever saw. They are very interesting creatures:).

Here she is with her egg sack and her dinner. The bigger brown spider was actually no match for her. She killed and wrapped it up in about 2 minutes.
2007_0814_021104AA.jpg


Here she is (bottom) with another black widow which also became her meal. I usually feed her black widows because they are the easiest bugs to find and catch around my house.
2007_0807_043140AA.jpg
 
I was going to crack wise with "my house is the range of the black widow" — I've killed four with egg sacs and a bunch more in the past two weeks, both in my garage and around the outside of my house — but I think Ray has me beat :)

Gives me shivers just thinking about keeping one in a bowl!
 
I also have a lot of Black Widows around the outside of my house. I have come to appreciate them. Rarely see one in the house (they seem to love to congregrate near the front and back doors. My experience has been that they are very mellow in their dealing with humans as opposed to centipedes, brown spiders, sun spiders, scorpions, and vinegaroons. But if you put any of the above larger creatures up against a black widow, they get aggressive really quick and normally kill their opponent.
 
I don't actually recall seeing a black widow in a non-man-made environment. I've seen plenty in my wood pile, in water meter boxes, in the crawl space under the house, etc. Haven't seen any "free-range" widows.

Although they seem quite unaggressive towards humans, a few months back a black widow almost gave my wife a heart attack. I was kneeling down on the bank above my house cutting up a small tree with the chainsaw. Saw the nasty little bugger traveling up my pants and just about to go under my shirt. I yelled like a woman, crushed the widow on my pants with the palm of my hand, and shut down the chainsaw. From the sound of my yell my wife thought I cut a hand off and came running out of the house very freaked out. It was a proud moment for me.
 
I've even found a very few here in Western Montana. Very cold here. The few I've seen have been in summer or early fall. All of them pretty small except one HUGE one. I'm guessing a female. All had a distinct red hourglass and the ones I've seen have all been in the same general area.
 
JCavSD said:
Yick, spiders are made for crushing, not keeping. :)
Click to expand...

And burning alive, with all their nasty babies popping on their backs.

Widows are fairly common down here. They don't mess with you; but, if you happen to grab one or slip your foot into a shoe containing one, you'll learn to look before sticking your hand or foot somewhere.

When I deployed to SWA back in the '90's, we were hanging out in a rundown old hanger, waiting to board the C-5. I climbed up on a stack of pallets and took a nap. I woke up, and rolled on my side, then glanced down into the stack of pallets. It was teaming with black widows. I hate spiders. I flew off of the pallets and proceeded to tear off everything I was wearing and check all my gear.

The widows were content just living in their stack of pallets and weren't interested in crawling on me. Several widow bites at the same time could really do a number on you...I can only imagine.:eek:
 
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