Julia noticed this spider on our dish rack and immediately went to the insect field guide when she noticed that it had a faint hourglass under it's abdomen.
She identified it as a brown widow almost immediately but it didn't seem quite right. The abdomen wasn't as large as the image of the female spider in the book and it had large round bulbous appendages near it's head. A little further investigation on wikipedia and then to this picture confirmed that what we had was in fact a small brown widow.
The males have very small fangs and are therefore much less dangerous than the females because they can't deliver as much venom but there are conflicting reports that the brown widow venom is either twice as strong or not as strong as the black widow. We decided to "get rid" of this chap rather than employ the usual Ramshackle catch and release program.
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ewww, that is so creepy, I would have "gotten rid" of it too. I usually scoop the daddy-long-legs up and put them outside, but if it can bite me, game over.
ReplyDeletegotta admit, he would've went outdoors....I don't even like killing the females.
ReplyDeleteI think I found one of these too just this week in Burbank, CA. The bigger female type. I had never seen one before. I thought it looked as threatening as a black widow, but thought it was unfair to judge the book by its cover, so took her outdoors. I have to eliminate the black widows since my husband is in kidney failure and I heard that, in his case, getting bit can shut the kidneys down very rapidly. Now I have that one out in the yard multiplying - yikes!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree with steph, we usually just take the spiders outside if they are in an inconvenient place or leave them alone to go where they will. I probaby reacted to hastily with this one and probably should have just moved it outside but with a crawling baby who likes to put everything in his mouth, we didn't want to take any chances. Today I found a black widow on our front steps.
ReplyDeleteha i caught a black widow and a brown widow im
ReplyDeleteonly 11 and i catch spiders .
that must be scary i had a brown widow on my window
ReplyDeleteHow did it get inside my car. I caught it now what do I do with it?
ReplyDeletenever mind it just died sylmar, california
ReplyDeletelooks scary
ReplyDelete