Black widows are losing to brown widows in the fight for attics and garages
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
He laughed, and said I didn't have a plague of spiders. I had a plague of carpenter ants in the deck, and the spiders were there to eat the ants. I pushed a screwdriver into one of the support beams, which looked perfectly fine. To my horror the screwdriver went all the way through the beam! The carpenter ants had completely eaten away the interior, it was just a painted shell. I had no idea why it had not collapsed.
So came the job of sawing off the old deck to replace it. Instead of falling down into a pile of lumber, it fell down into a pile of dust. It was loaded into a truck with a shovel.
Years later, when I decided to build a custom house, it had a concrete deck with an iron railing.
Moral: if you've got a lot of spiders, they're there for a reason. The real problem is hidden.
Providing they stick to the back yard I can appreciate them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)
Portia spiders are used to pre-populate a terraformed planet (among a few other species like ants) before humans arrive but [minor spoiler] they eventually take over the entire planet and develop an advanced society. Which causes an interesting conflict when a lost group of humans do arrive much later than planned via spaceship.
The sequel book takes the same concept but uses an octopus takeover of a water planet.
Spiders are slightly higher class citizens, and more likely to be safely captured and released outdoors... but are ultimately subject to the same regime, at least between my walls.
To keep them out of the house interior I find their nest and give them food and water.
Last spring I had a handyman come by to clean up the yard and paint the fences and told him about the railings. He poked around them and stuck a screwdriver into a soft spot and out came a bunch of carpenter ants. He laughed and said the squirrels weren't ripping up my deck but looking for food. I stupidly assumed squirrels were herbivores when they are in fact omnivorous.
Most wood frame construction has very poor consideration of keeping it dry. I bought the book "Common Sense Pest Control"
https://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Pest-Control-Least-Toxic...
and incorporated many of its solutions into the house I had built. It has paid off handsomely, the house has needed very little maintenance, there's no rot, and I haven't had much trouble with pests. The increased construction cost was very, very little.
For example, destructive insects like to get in cracks in the concrete foundation, and move upwards into the wooden sill plate, then up into the walls of the house. The usual construction technique is to put a piece of plastic between the sill and the foundation, if they put anything at all. I had a sheet of stainless steel put there instead.
(Also, concrete absorbs water like a sponge. Concrete in contact with wood will rot the wood over time.)
Moral: if you've got a lot of spiders, use concrete!
Compared to the black widow bite, I think I'm rooting for these guys.
only the extremely young and old will have a hard time with a black widow bite, and black widow bites kill about 6 people a year.
I have been bitten by black widows multiple times, because I liked to stick my hands inside piles of cut wood looking for bugs as a child. yes, these were verified black widow bites.
the only time I had any sickness or wound to show was when I had a small wound that took two weeks to heal instead of less than one, and it was very tender the whole time, which was unusual.
maybe black widow bites just don't bother me, but I doubt it. every other bite from every other bug always hurt a lot and left a mark, at best.
https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/black-wid...
That's not what you said at all. You didn't say 'this was my experience' at first, you said that it wasn't a big deal for anyone because most people survive. Now you're saying you are just giving your experience.
he stopped the channel and stream for a week because he was seriously ill and went to the emergency room one of the days
"nothing to fear" is not really correct
Some people end up with a red swelling, itch, pain and that’s it. This is the majority of cases.
Others can end up with a large area of tissue necrosis and get very sick. Some require skin grafts.
I am not aware of black widow venom causing necrosis, it is a neurotoxin, causing things like paralysis.
And indeed, in both cases, serious conditions are rare. Also, many bites are dry bites, where no venom is injected.
Tissue necrosis would suggest an infection, or a different spider bite (like a brown recluse bite). Black widow venom, on its own, doesn't lead to significant necrosis.
All spider bites, and skin punctures in general, can get infected. If infected by flesh-eating bacteria, recluse-like tissue necrosis results. This results in overreporting of brown recluse bites, due to brown recluse paranoia and availability bias.
Besides, the main components of the venom of the spider are collagenase, protease, phospholipase, hyaluronidase, neurotoxin, and tissue-dissolving toxin. The secreted venom not only damages local tissue of the bite, but also causes local tissue swelling, degeneration, necrosis, ulcer formation...
Also, the claim in that (Chinese) paper of necrotic venom isn't well sourced.
You should change that to you learned because we learned that even things that don't kill us could permanently harm us.
Just ask all the people who've developed long-lasting permanent injuries from COVID. Long COVID is a thing.
This part kind of clouds the data. He held it with foreceps against his skin for 10 seconds, which is far longer than a normal bite. It's not really representative of the bite you'd get if you put your hand in a woodpile or something.
2. I have kids. Fuck them spiders.
kids survive and almost always suffer very few ill effects. newborn babies and the very old make up the less than 1 dozen who die of a black widow bite each year.
>black widow bites kill about 6 people a year
This part is not:
> healthy adults have nothing to fear from a black widow spider. only the extremely young and old will have a hard time with a black widow bite
Plenty of people have extremely serious reactions that fall short of death. That’s still worth avoiding!
Or have Brown Widows now added a potent selection pressure to make Black Widows more aggressive...
Humans have long facilitated and underestimated the unintended downsides of introduced species.
Northeast US I’ve never seen a black widow larger than say an American quarter. They are smaller spiders as I know them
The sample size wasn't exactly huge (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088761851...) but the science seems to resonate with other research in the field.
All of this is to say that it's possible that someone may perceive a spider to be much bigger than it really is, through no fault of their own.
There are 83 works on Google Scholar citing the paper I linked above: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1525421616690417423...
I'm not qualified to judge these papers nor their journals, but some of them may serve as a jumping off point for your own research if you're interested! Some papers seem to revolve around general state-of-mind biases ("Human safety and risk management"), while others focus on more concrete links such as biases in perception of "interpersonal distance".
Huh.
The redback here in Aus is likely somewhere between the two...
It has the same poison as a black widow, just seems to inject less of it...in most cases...
I would not recommend treating these spiders casually
But living in the south, I have noticed brown widows winning the battle for my wood piles. I'm not sure I realized they were a different species until recently. I just assumed they were a natural variation in color, perhaps related to age. Now that I've realized the difference, I'm definitely realizing most of the widows I encounter are the brown variety.
The distinction I see most commonly here is the leg banding. True black widows almost always have solid, glossy black legs, without any coloration along them along them. Brown widows do seem to have a lot of difference in coloration along the abdomen, but sometimes look rather plain with abdomens more like some other species, which is why I'd look to the leg colors and body shape as well.
I'd welcome advice from an actual arachnologist on this, though!
They both have extremely predictable hiding spots, so I've never really feared them. It's not like they jump out at you, they retreat first into their hidey holes.
Granted, I did walk into the bottom of a web when I went to take out the trash last year. It didn't fall on me but the thought of it doing so was alarming...
for those that do (or perhaps don't) can i suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)
It's the one reason why I think those books are just never going to be adapted to TV/Film.
I honestly don't know how they're going to adapt it. A significant portion of the story is told from the perspective of the spiders. Just having giant spiders is going to make people freak out, let alone some of the scenes I remember from the book.
That doesn't even include the second book, which has even more.
> Just having giant spiders is going to make people freak out
This could be a real problem... maybe they can make them look cute, or something. Still not going to be helpful for people with arachnophobia.
FWIW, I fought them for years and finally gave up. I easily had over a hundred at any given time on my 6800 sq ft lot. Every night they'd spin webs between any vertical surface(i.e. my house, the fence, block walls) and the ground. In 16 years I never had an issue with bites to either me or my pets. I would clean the ones out that took residence under deck chairs, but that was about it. I never saw them inside the structure of my house, with the exception of < 1' from the garage door because there were gaps around it.
I had a healthy collection of daddy longlegs inside the garage. Not sure if they kept the widows in check.
The #1 enemy of widows is other widows, and they spread fast, so fighting them is often a losing battle.
That sounds like... a case of one species outcompeting another for habitat. What does Asher Elbein think territorial competition normally looks like? I'll call the tree, and you call the tree, and whoever it goes to gets to live in it?
That might be eating their food, or leading predators to them, or killing them yourself, but unless you do something to hurt them, the territory they hold is going to grow over time, not shrink.
Like you wouldn’t describe us as “outcompeting” Bluefin Tuna, but we are doing our best to drive them to extinction by eating them.
We don't describe ourselves as "outcompeting" tuna because they don't have anything we want.
But the brown widows are infringing on the black widows' niche; they are specifically described as occupying the territory they're removing the black widows from and it's a safe bet that, with their webs in the same places, they're eating the same things. The human population of the ocean remains at zero.
Not quite predation either, because despite eating then, it is unlikely the whole thing was purely about food. On the other hand, spiders don't go to wars, they do not coordinate nor make plans.
Once it got cold I haven seen any of them. I did have to take care of some I found on things my toddler frequents.
Cool, so this will drive evolutionary pressure to create aggressive black widows. Awesome. That's exactly what the world needed.
They're beautiful, I guess I got bit at one point because my whole arm was red and swollen.
My wife took me to the local hospital and I was admitted with an infected wound and put straight onto IV antibiotics and a heart monitor. I spent a month in intensive care while the doctors worked to find an antibiotic that was effective against the infection, all the time I was on Oxycontin for the pain.
The leg suffered nerve and muscle damage and I had a large ulcer that took a year to heal. At one point there was talk of plastic surgery. I was never told directly I might need an amputation, but looking at the pictures, that could well have been the outcome if the damage got worse. My leg was in bandages for a year and was cleaned & redressed 2-3 times a week at a local clinic.
I had to learn to walk again, starting with a frame and then onto crutches. My leg is now healed, but looks like it has had chunks carved out of it in both the upper and lower sections, and I can sometimes be unsteady on my feet due to the effects of the nerve and muscle damage.
Several other people in the UK have also reacted badly to false widow bites and lost fingers or needed skin grafts.
Pro tip: If you think you have been bitten by a false widow, have it checked out.
Sorry to hear about your leg. Good reminder that the facade of our security and routine we so highly value in modern society can come crashing down for the seemingly smallest of reasons.
Now that I read you, I guess I might not have been bitten by a false widow.
But in your case, it seems it was because of the infection, not the venom.
Other examples include poisonous frogs, fish, etc.
Basically anything that has bright colors in flashy styling, you stay the hell away from.
I view them like perfectly engineered, self replicating, insect exterminators we might someday soon buy (with a cloud app): they work for you day and night keeping pests at bay and they do their darnedest to stay out of sight.
We shouldn’t be terrified of them, but a healthy respect is probably wise.
Other spiders get left alone around my house, but not widows.
Sigh.
And by the way, I lived in Texas for 17 years and never once saw someone "wave a gun around", and only once saw someone carrying openly.
I grew up in the north east though, and guns were everywhere, I remember going to a movie with my wife, standing in line for tickets and a gun fell out of the jacket of the man in front of me, who appeared to be a gang member.
But please, let's just keep with the knee-jerk political comments. Maybe we can bring them into a discussion about daffodils or something next.
I can only speak for LA, but the red are Bloods, while the orange are Hoovers who are allied with Crips
It's interesting how the other words in the sentence shape your expectations for even the first two words.
Edit: lol, didn’t even make the connection after reading your comment that it isn’t “windows”.
I won't use them for anything that doesn't pose a structural threat to my house (i.e. termites), but others do.
How do you move around without sticking to a dozen traps and having a dozen others slam shut on you?
When a pest control company deals with them in your home the poison they use is designed to not kill right away. It is defined to get on the ones in your home and be carried back to the colony with them where it spreads to all of them. Then when it kills it takes out the whole colony.
Note this means that even though they might be in several houses in the neighborhood whoever first discovers them in their house usually ends up paying to remove them from the whole neighborhood. That can cost a couple thousand dollars or more.
I wonder if anyone ever tries to take advantage of that? For example if you find you have subterranean termites give a neighbor or two gift certificates for a termite inspection, in the hope that one of them also has them and pays to get rid of them.
“Experience: a stranger secretly lived in my home”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/10/experie...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436374/
Taking the theme to a fantastic extreme is the amazing french miniseries Beyond the Walls (Au-delà des murs), which has a whole bizarre world secretly living in your house.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/cl...
http://tonsoffacts.com/25-fascinating-and-amazing-facts-abou...
As in they do acknowledge the usefulness of spiders in general while also being significantly creeped out by them.
Same here btw. And for other species too. Like ants. I acknowledge that they are very useful creatures so they can totally "dig up the lawn" and I don't care. They can also climb up the cherry trees and others and do their thing there as long as I get enough cherries to make jam and eat in summer. But as soon as even one sets foot in the house I try everything to kill said colony.
With my pup, I just hope they stay off the floor because I know their only hope is being faster than her attention and her curious mouth.