Black Widow - NH 068

NH 068

Black Widow

Category: Arachnids

Family: Theridiidae

So after a a bit of a large break in the series Spider Saturday is back. This is a bit temporary at the moment as I still need to identify some of my spiders before I post them up here and have to wait until summer when I can capture some more (with a bit more diversity as well). But this is a pretty exciting addition with a bit of an interesting back-story. Also, you should note that I have come up with a new photographing structure that I will start taking up for smaller specimens. I hope it looks a bit more professional but as you can see it also includes a scale (per complaints). This scale in the bottom left has a white block and a black block each is 1cm long.

Anyway, the specimen if you haven't figured it out by now is a vial that contains quite a few baby black widow spiders. Latrodectus mactans to be exact. It's a interesting story as to its come-abouts. Over the summer my friend was collecting spiders, and without here knowing her sister placed an eggsac into one of the empty vials. Later, my friend showed us the vial which had the hatched eggsac and hundreds of baby spiders, but we didn't know what they were. Afterwards, my friend left the vial outside to let the spiders go, then we all found out that the eggsac was actually from a black widow. Don't worry though as the black widows couldn't survive in the chilly climate so no harm. In the end she thankfully donated the vial with some remaining spiders in it to me, and you should be able to clearly see one largish spider in the middle and the eggsac to the right, along with some fine web structure. The eggsac was collected in Matthews, North Carolina, USA in August of 2010.

I'm sure we all have heard some facts about black widows. In this particular species the females do on occasion eat the males and both sexes are venomous and can be fatal (the males however generally don't bite as their chelicerae (mouthparts) are too small). They do have the distinctive red hourglass pattern on their abdomens. Their diet consists mainly of insects and are occasionally preyed on my wasps, mantids, and centipedes. While their venom is extremely potent it is extracted in such small volumes that it generally doesn't lead to death but can still be quite harmful.

I've also included a very cool photograph of what the vial looked like after the eggsac hatched and all the spiders where still inside, rather than just the few that remain. And if you want to look up more information check out this black widow page. Enjoy!