The Magnet 096: Brown Widows, Isolated Spots on Earth, and an Illuminatus! comic book
Dear readers, it’s been a busy summer for me as I try not to broil in my house with no air conditioning. We have so many fans running that we could rent the place out as a wind tunnel. I hope you are having a great summer. Please let me know what you are up to in the comments. — Mark
I Found a Brown Widow Spider and Learned That They Are Bullies Toward Black Widows
This week, while in my kitchen, I noticed a spider on the outside of my window. I sent a photo to Google Lens, which identified it as a Brown Widow. The spider had built a web in an upper corner of the window. A fly hovered nearby, exciting the spider, which quickly ran up its web to get closer. I watched for a couple of minutes until the fly disappeared from view. After turning to take a slice of bread from the toaster, I looked back and saw that the spider had caught the fly and was already wrapping it up. Although I missed the capture, I managed to record about 30 seconds of the spider encasing the fly in silk, which you can see in the video I uploaded to YouTube.
Black Widows are common around our house. I regularly check our outdoor furniture for them, often finding them hiding on the underside of chairs in their chaotic webs. Brown Widows are less common. I initially mistook them for immature Black Widows, but they're actually a separate species. While Black Widows are native to the United States, Brown Widows are believed to have arrived from South Africa in the mid-1930s. Brown Widow bites are less toxic than those of Black Widows, but they're more aggressive, especially towards their black counterparts.
A 1993 New York Times article reports that Brown Widows are causing the Black Widow population to decline. In experiments, "researchers found that brown widows were 6.6 times as likely to kill black widows than other species. Young brown widows in particular made a beeline for their native cousins, eating them 80 percent of the time."
And this excerpt made me feel kind of sorry for Black Widows:
Brown widows tend to be bold, investigating nearby webs and attacking spiders that don't resist. House and cobweb spiders challenge them, and brown widows often go on to coexist with them peacefully. The shy, retiring black widows generally tried to escape, fighting back only as a last resort.
Louis Coticchio, the lead researcher and a science tutor at St. Petersburg College in Florida, argues that Black Widows have an undeserved bad reputation. While America's Poison Centers reported 1,004 Black Widow spider bite cases in 2010, fatalities are extremely rare. "Black widows generally don't bite when harassed," Coticchio told the Times, noting that they prefer to run, play dead, or flick webbing at a threatening finger. "It's only pinching them that'll get you bit."
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