Black Widow Spiders

As a teacher in any area of the country it is important to teach about any organism that may pose a danger to children or adults. One of these is the Black Widow Spider. They are more common than you may think. The adult female is about 1.5 inches in length. In general they move slowly, are a dark shiny black color and have an hourglass shape in red on their underside. There are a variety of different species of "Widow" spiders and they have different markings. The male is about one half the size of the female. The mail may be a dark brown with a yellowish hourglass mark. Juvenile black widow spiders are usually brown with yellow stripes and a yellowish hourglass mark.

They most often come out at night, capture a variety of different insects and quickly wrap them in web material and inject their potent poison which acts within minutes. To capture black widow spiders in some areas you might try taking a Styrofoam cup, push a stick into the ground and then put the cup upside down on the stick. Place this "trap" behind bushes in dark shady locations. Check after a few days. Be careful, their bite can be deadly, but are more dangerous to the very young, very old, or people with other health problems. Get treatment quickly if bitten.

Because their poison is so deadly they do not need to spin an intricate web, so often their web building is minimal. You can capture them in a glass jar which will then let you look at the underside much easier as it crawls on the wall of the jar. Because it does feed quite often at any one point in time it may not have a great amount of poison available, but remember it does not need much.

At one time when I was young I read about a company that was paying between $5.00 and $10.00 per spider. They wanted each spider to be placed into a single large test tube and to push a piece of cotton into the top of the test tube. They wanted just a couple of drops of water to be placed on the cotton. This was not supposed to be so much that the cotton would possibly move or fall out. They did not want the tube sealed in any other way. Then these test tubes were to be wrapped in a fair amount of bubble wrap and shipped. I am not certain how the Post Office would have liked this, but it was interesting.

I once had one crawling on a sofa where I was sitting, captured it in a jar and did look at the underside. Recently there have been more reports of people being bitten by spiders, but most of these are probably from other spiders. There are many interesting spiders around the world with many unusual behaviors. Many female spiders will eat their mate. Some male spiders will ease out onto the female's web and pluck one of the threads on the web. This is a bit like plucking the string on a guitar. This seems to calm the female and the male will move out to the female and mate. After mating, the male often must run quickly away. If she should catch and eat him, well he then has provided nourishment for the female. This is why the females are called "black widows".

At one time most of the bites from spiders were in old outhouses and woodpiles, but we don't have many of those anymore. Spiders are difficult to kill with typical sprays. Your house may need special treatment if you have a significant spider problem. Teachers, You are not allowed to have any poisonous animal in the classroom, even in a jar, even preserved and dead in a jar, You might be allowed have one completely embedded in solid plastic, but even then must take great care and check with your district about the rules. A child can get poisoned even from a dead organism.

The female deposits her eggs in a globular silken container and can produce several egg sacs in one summer, each containing about 400 eggs. The eggs incubate for twenty to thirty days with the survival rate being quite low, due to cannibalism. It females mature in two to four months and live for about 180 days after maturing. The male only lives for about ninety days.

The thread of a spider is stronger than steel for its size and recently the gene for making silk has been transferred into a female mouse. The female mouse then produced mouse milk that contained spider thread. (Try to visualize a scientist milking a mouse!) The idea is that if the gene could be moved into a cow, then the thread produced would be greater, could be strained out from the milk, and woven into cloth. the resulting cloth might be so tough that it would be bullet proof.