Southern Black Widow

Fascinating facts about the Southern Black Widow

• A mature female black widow fits in the palm of your hand, measuring just 8-13 mm long, while a male is only 3-6 mm. When she's carrying eggs, her belly can swell to over 1.25 cm across, about the size of a small button. This tiny body packs a potent bite, yet the spider's chelicerae are only about 1 mm long, just enough to pierce human skin. The size difference means only females can deliver venom to people.
• A single female can lay four to nine egg sacs each summer, each holding 100-400 eggs. After about 20-30 days of incubation, only a few survive, on average thirty hatchlings make it through the first molt. Most perish from cannibalism, starvation or lack of shelter.
• Despite a reputation for deadly bites, black widows cause virtually no human deaths. About two thousand bites are reported each year, yet studies of 23,409 documented bites from 2000-2008 recorded zero fatalities. The venom's LD-50 in mice is 1.39 mg/kg (or 1.30 mg/kg in another test). These numbers reveal that while the bite is painful, the risk of death is exceedingly low for healthy adults.
• Black widows thrive from the deserts of Arizona to the forests of New England, reaching as far north as Massachusetts and New Hampshire and as far west as California, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. They also inhabit the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada and even the Hawaiian Islands, often hitching rides in imported produce.
• The black widow's silk is not just a trap, it's a high-tensile, three-dimensional cobweb that can hold prey while the spider injects venom. The web's strength lets the spider wrap prey. This efficient hunting system lets a single spider control large numbers of insects, helping to keep pest populations in check across farms and homes.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Southern Black Widow

In the shadowy recesses of the southern landscape, the Southern Black Widow weaves her intricate web, a masterful huntress with a patience as dark as the glossy ebony of her carapace. With deliberate, almost languid movements, she navigates the tangled threads of her domain, ever-vigilant for the tremors that signal the entrapment of her unsuspecting prey. As she glides silently, the crimson hourglass emblazoned on her abdomen glows like a warning beacon, a striking emblem of the potent venom that courses through her lithe, black body.

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