On a seemingly ordinary Saturday afternoon, my roommate Jeff Jones approaches me and nonchalantly informs me that he has seen a "big-ass" spider loitering in our garage. 15 minutes later, after smearing our faces with green and black camouflage and preparing Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" to play as we entered, we stormed into our garage armed with a Maglite flashlight and a Tupperware container. After a fair bit of spider hunting, we found our target dangling maliciously from garage door rails in the corner of the room. Not only was the spider huge, black, and disgusting, but we immediately noticed the red hourglass it bore on its abdomen, identifying it as the one and only female black widow, or Latrodectus Mactan. Several extremely tense seconds of high-adrenaline spider poking later (we used a pencil) the little beast was ours. The literal translation of the Latin is "Murderous Biting Robber," and comes from the Black Widow’s ritual of killing the male after mating, thereby becoming a “widow.” Its retractable fangs hold a poison that is 15 times more powerful than rattle snake venom, awarding it the title of "Most Poisonous Spider in the U.S." This made it a little disconcerting for us to find it living cozily in our house, especially since our roommate Brian Zaharris had just the other morning awoken to find a spider bite on his eyelid. The spider bite was, however, completely hilarious, as Brian had to spend the rest of the day with a swollen eyelid, looking very much like Sloth from the movie "The Goonies". Brian is all better now though, so I can make fun of him and his once puffy eye.
Anyways, the Black Widow is presently living in a salsa jar on the coffee table in our den. To date we have held one spider fight, which was Black Widow vs. another spider I captured late at night upon discovering it was plotting to bite me. The fight was called and ended in a decision in favor of the Black Widow, since the challenger crumpled up and burst under the effects of the toxic venom after about 60 seconds. The whole venomous affair is contained in exciting digital video format on my camera. The fight took place in the salsa jar and was very similar to scenes from the Mel Gibson flick thunderdome.However, Tina Turner's hair in that movie is in fact scarier than our Black Widow.
Please leave a comment with your suggestion for what to name our new pet Widow. So far “Charlotte” is in the lead.
Brush with Death and Subsequent Inspiration to Blog
