For years I had a plague of brown spiders on my deck. I finally called an exterminator.
He laughed, and said I didn't have a plague of spiders. I had a plague of carpenter ants in the deck, and the spiders were there to eat the ants. I pushed a screwdriver into one of the support beams, which looked perfectly fine. To my horror the screwdriver went all the way through the beam! The carpenter ants had completely eaten away the interior, it was just a painted shell. I had no idea why it had not collapsed.
So came the job of sawing off the old deck to replace it. Instead of falling down into a pile of lumber, it fell down into a pile of dust. It was loaded into a truck with a shovel.
Years later, when I decided to build a custom house, it had a concrete deck with an iron railing.
Moral: if you've got a lot of spiders, they're there for a reason. The real problem is hidden.
Few years back during spring I noticed soft parts of my deck railing getting chewed up by squirrels. I was puzzled as the squirrels never touched the deck prior to this. I figured the soft wood was weathered as the deck was old and the squirrels were enjoying chewing it or it was a form of oral care.
Last spring I had a handyman come by to clean up the yard and paint the fences and told him about the railings. He poked around them and stuck a screwdriver into a soft spot and out came a bunch of carpenter ants. He laughed and said the squirrels weren't ripping up my deck but looking for food. I stupidly assumed squirrels were herbivores when they are in fact omnivorous.
They stopped allowing arsenic (Chromated Copper Arsenate) in pressure treated lumber in 2003 in the US. The replacement is not nearly as resistant to rot and pests, and the quality of the lumber used has also decreased in the decades since. There are lots of bandaids in the construction industry like putting tape along the tops of the joists to reduce the amount of water that gets in, but it looks like the industry is probably going to move to metal framing and plastic-based products for construction designed to last 10 years or more. Plastic based decking (eg Trex) has already taken over everything except the low end.
and incorporated many of its solutions into the house I had built. It has paid off handsomely, the house has needed very little maintenance, there's no rot, and I haven't had much trouble with pests. The increased construction cost was very, very little.
For example, destructive insects like to get in cracks in the concrete foundation, and move upwards into the wooden sill plate, then up into the walls of the house. The usual construction technique is to put a piece of plastic between the sill and the foundation, if they put anything at all. I had a sheet of stainless steel put there instead.
(Also, concrete absorbs water like a sponge. Concrete in contact with wood will rot the wood over time.)
In think the reason you can’t use metal is because building code is significantly more lenient for wood structures. As soon as you bring metal into the mix you get stuck with more complicated engineering and permits
It's coming. There's plenty of engineering experience framing with metal, Light Gauge Steel (LGS) framing has been around for decades. This is just adding a new use case.
Yeah I get that steel is a better material in many cases but building code is going to be slow to catch up, or wood simply has a grandfather clause that makes things simpler
Trex also has the unfortunate long term habit of sagging as if it’s getting softer, which looks terrible and causes water to collect on the cupped surfaces.
It's why I try not to kill spiders I find in my home and just throw them outside. They're nature's exterminators. Though it's easy for me since in my country we don't have such dangerous spiders.
Common black ants as well. If one of them finds a single termite larvae they will leave a pheromone trail and shortly thereafter an army will devour that larvae and they will break up into teams and scout all the walls and floors for more of them.
To keep them out of the house interior I find their nest and give them food and water.
House centipedes as well, while they look creepy as hell they’re discreet and efficient bug hunters. Including silverfishes, which are bad and should feel bad.
As long as they're discreet, they have my tentative permission to go about their business. But I will provide selection pressure towards discretion if I happen to be startled by their appearance.
Spiders are slightly higher class citizens, and more likely to be safely captured and released outdoors... but are ultimately subject to the same regime, at least between my walls.
Whenever I meet a new spider in my home I have 2 rules: 1. Don’t be dangerous to my family 2. Do not enter my bedroom. If these rules are violated I’ll kindly escort them out.
Jumping spiders are my best friends, I’d raise them if I could keep anything alive. As-is, I just try not to bother them when one takes up residence in a corner of a room.
Portia spiders are used to pre-populate a terraformed planet (among a few other species like ants) before humans arrive but [minor spoiler] they eventually take over the entire planet and develop an advanced society. Which causes an interesting conflict when a lost group of humans do arrive much later than planned via spaceship.
The sequel book takes the same concept but uses an octopus takeover of a water planet.
Funny, was thinking the same thing. The audible version is great. Book 1 is pretty good. If you want, stop it there and there won’t be too much you are missing. I’ve listened to the three that are out, this is my preference but would say I enjoyed all 3 but not a lot of value added after the first one.
Oh I didn't know there was a 3rd one. But yeah the 2nd one had some slow wading moments, basically the obligation to make it have a beginning/middle/end type story under insane constraints while keeping it plausible. But it's worth the price of admission to nerd out on some earth species taking over some local region of space in another solar system.
The noise though. A long time ago I stayed in an old stone building in the south of France. There were dozens of these things on each wall. They'd crawl about at night and drive me insane. The pitter patter of a thousand tiny feet...
I also had a major problem with yellowjackets. Clouds of them! That turned out to be caused by cedar shingles, as those were ideal nesting places for the yellowjackets. The roof was getting old anyway, and so I had it replaced with asphalt shingles. No more yellowjackets.
Hard to do if thats a deck. You can apply paint, sealant, and other things to prolong it but you have to reapply it every once in a while...forget for too long and then you have a discolored deck and will eventually start rotting.
The article only mentions it in passing, but the Brown Widow bite is much, much less dangerous. No medical attention required, just clean it and apply itch cream, if you want.
Compared to the black widow bite, I think I'm rooting for these guys.
Yeah this is the best news I’ve heard today. And I’m certainly not going to go easy on the black widows I do find just because they’re having a hard time. I hope they get eradicated.
> 10:45 a.m.: The spider was permitted to bite for 10 seconds.
This part kind of clouds the data. He held it with foreceps against his skin for 10 seconds, which is far longer than a normal bite. It's not really representative of the bite you'd get if you put your hand in a woodpile or something.
Black widow venom is neurotoxic, and pain is its most distinguishing feature.
Tissue necrosis would suggest an infection, or a different spider bite (like a brown recluse bite). Black widow venom, on its own, doesn't lead to significant necrosis.
All spider bites, and skin punctures in general, can get infected. If infected by flesh-eating bacteria, recluse-like tissue necrosis results. This results in overreporting of brown recluse bites, due to brown recluse paranoia and availability bias.
Black widow venom contains more than just neurotoxin, but also toxins that attack the tissue.
Besides, the main components of the venom of the spider are collagenase, protease, phospholipase, hyaluronidase, neurotoxin, and tissue-dissolving toxin. The secreted venom not only damages local tissue of the bite, but also causes local tissue swelling, degeneration, necrosis, ulcer formation...
A lot of bites have some localized tissue damage, whether caused by toxins produced by the venomous animal's genome or resident bacteria in their venom glands (aside from bacteria getting into the wound separately, causing some amount of necrosis). Concentration matters, and I haven't seen anything indicating that necrosis is a real problem in black widow bites like it can can be from recluse venom (allegedly) or flesh-eating bacteria.
Also, the claim in that (Chinese) paper of necrotic venom isn't well sourced.
most will categorize a black widow bite near a bee-sting.
I have been bitten by black widows multiple times, because I liked to stick my hands inside piles of cut wood looking for bugs as a child. yes, these were verified black widow bites.
the only time I had any sickness or wound to show was when I had a small wound that took two weeks to heal instead of less than one, and it was very tender the whole time, which was unusual.
maybe black widow bites just don't bother me, but I doubt it. every other bite from every other bug always hurt a lot and left a mark, at best.
That's not what you said at all. You didn't say 'this was my experience' at first, you said that it wasn't a big deal for anyone because most people survive. Now you're saying you are just giving your experience.
kids survive and almost always suffer very few ill effects. newborn babies and the very old make up the less than 1 dozen who die of a black widow bite each year.
That's funny, because as a child I was completely terrified by the prospect of a black widow. I thought they were basically like a small demon in spider form.
Interesting, they are both latrodectus species, and (according to wikipedia) the brown widow has venom that is more potent in mice (0.43 mg/kg LD50 vs 1.39 mg/kg), it's just that they can't inject very much of it.
Huh.
The redback here in Aus is likely somewhere between the two...
i bought one of those cattle watering tanks to make a swimming pool ( wife's idea ). When it was delivered it had some very large black widows happily living inside. I wanted to leave them be but they were so big, i'm probably exaggerating but i swear they were as big as your fist, and I have kids so an executive decision was made.
There's an interesting phenomena where the brains of people with arachnophobia will enlarge the perceived size of spiders. People with an irrational fear of spiders literally perceive spiders to be bigger than other people.
I'm no doctor, nor am I a psychologist, so I can't easily pick out good sources for this topic. All I remember is this particular story hitting the news and really resonating with me (mostly because I have an irrational reaction to spiders myself, though "fear" may not be the right term).
I'm not qualified to judge these papers nor their journals, but some of them may serve as a jumping off point for your own research if you're interested! Some papers seem to revolve around general state-of-mind biases ("Human safety and risk management"), while others focus on more concrete links such as biases in perception of "interpersonal distance".
I don't know about my attic and garage. I have a zero tolerance policy for widow spiders in/on the house, although I leave their predators alone to have a natural deterrent.
But living in the south, I have noticed brown widows winning the battle for my wood piles. I'm not sure I realized they were a different species until recently. I just assumed they were a natural variation in color, perhaps related to age. Now that I've realized the difference, I'm definitely realizing most of the widows I encounter are the brown variety.
When I lived in the south there were black widows everywhere, some browns. Now in CA, it's mostly browns.
They both have extremely predictable hiding spots, so I've never really feared them. It's not like they jump out at you, they retreat first into their hidey holes.
They have a distinct hourglass of some color on the underside of their abdomens, while their abdomens are mostly brown or patterned (and not pretty much solid black aside from the hourglass)?
The hourglass is not always as clear as pictures would have you believe. Once you get to know the body shape, true widows pretty distinctive among spiders around here. (The false widow to me isn't a real lookalike because of the leg shape, but there are other bulbous dark spiders.)
The distinction I see most commonly here is the leg banding. True black widows almost always have solid, glossy black legs, without any coloration along them along them. Brown widows do seem to have a lot of difference in coloration along the abdomen, but sometimes look rather plain with abdomens more like some other species, which is why I'd look to the leg colors and body shape as well.
I'd welcome advice from an actual arachnologist on this, though!
Not an archnologist, but I've found one each tell if that their webs are way stretchier than most other spiders. You'll pull one and it will just keep going like a rubber band.
In related news, joro spiders are taking over the state of Georgia. They're huge and look creepy, but on the plus side they apparently don't bite humans so you can just leave their horrific gold webs in place in your yard.
Granted, I did walk into the bottom of a web when I went to take out the trash last year. It didn't fall on me but the thought of it doing so was alarming...
I honestly don't know how they're going to adapt it. A significant portion of the story is told from the perspective of the spiders. Just having giant spiders is going to make people freak out, let alone some of the scenes I remember from the book.
That doesn't even include the second book, which has even more.
In San Diego in... 2010? I remember seeing the population change. At first I thought the brown widows were just immature black widows, since they basically looked the same with lighter color and an alternating pattern. Read about the brown widows a few years later and it made sense.
FWIW, I fought them for years and finally gave up. I easily had over a hundred at any given time on my 6800 sq ft lot. Every night they'd spin webs between any vertical surface(i.e. my house, the fence, block walls) and the ground. In 16 years I never had an issue with bites to either me or my pets. I would clean the ones out that took residence under deck chairs, but that was about it. I never saw them inside the structure of my house, with the exception of < 1' from the garage door because there were gaps around it.
I had a healthy collection of daddy longlegs inside the garage. Not sure if they kept the widows in check.
The #1 enemy of widows is other widows, and they spread fast, so fighting them is often a losing battle.
I live in a part of the world unblessed with deadly or even dangerous spiders. But no way I'm at ease with them. Daddy longlegs have had free run af the house since the first time I saw one making short shrift of a spider much more massive than itself. A smal resident population now keeps most of the scary stuff away.
> This isn’t a case of one species outcompeting another for food or habitat. In research published Monday in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, biologists found that young brown widow spiders have a dramatic tendency to seek out and kill their American cousins.
That sounds like... a case of one species outcompeting another for habitat. What does Asher Elbein think territorial competition normally looks like? I'll call the tree, and you call the tree, and whoever it goes to gets to live in it?
It’s outright predation, which is a little different. The idea here is that the Brown Widows aren’t eating the Black Widows’ food sources, or otherwise infringing on their niche- they are just straight up eating them.
Like you wouldn’t describe us as “outcompeting” Bluefin Tuna, but we are doing our best to drive them to extinction by eating them.
If one Maori tribe wins a battle with another tribe, occupies its territory, and eats the slain losers, would we describe that as "competition" or "predation"?
We don't describe ourselves as "outcompeting" tuna because they don't have anything we want.
But the brown widows are infringing on the black widows' niche; they are specifically described as occupying the territory they're removing the black widows from and it's a safe bet that, with their webs in the same places, they're eating the same things. The human population of the ocean remains at zero.
These are biological terms and mean things. Outcompeting means something else then predation. Maori example falls into politics and the words to be used there would be war, genocide and cannibalism.
Not quite predation either, because despite eating then, it is unlikely the whole thing was purely about food. On the other hand, spiders don't go to wars, they do not coordinate nor make plans.
Having more babies can't produce the effect that the competitor's population goes down over time. You have to do something to hurt them.
That might be eating their food, or leading predators to them, or killing them yourself, but unless you do something to hurt them, the territory they hold is going to grow over time, not shrink.
I’m the summer I had a ton of brown widows and some black widows on my property. After reading up on it I wanted to let the brown widows hang around but honestly I started finding way too many everywhere. If you do have these, beware they reproduce in the summer at a very fast pace.
Once it got cold I haven seen any of them. I did have to take care of some I found on things my toddler frequents.
As a Texan this sounds like fantastic news! One of the terrifying things about our state is black widows are EVERYWHERE. In the part where I'm from every barn, every water well, and any other outdoor structure you put your hands in has a black widow in it somewhere.
I was bitten on the leg by one three years ago in the UK. At first I only had a small, raised bite mark, which went away after a week of applying some antiseptic cream. Then, one morning a few weeks later, I woke up with an *extremely* painful leg and could not put any weight on it.
My wife took me to the local hospital and I was admitted with an infected wound and put straight onto IV antibiotics and a heart monitor. I spent a month in intensive care while the doctors worked to find an antibiotic that was effective against the infection, all the time I was on Oxycontin for the pain.
The leg suffered nerve and muscle damage and I had a large ulcer that took a year to heal. At one point there was talk of plastic surgery. I was never told directly I might need an amputation, but looking at the pictures, that could well have been the outcome if the damage got worse. My leg was in bandages for a year and was cleaned & redressed 2-3 times a week at a local clinic.
I had to learn to walk again, starting with a frame and then onto crutches. My leg is now healed, but looks like it has had chunks carved out of it in both the upper and lower sections, and I can sometimes be unsteady on my feet due to the effects of the nerve and muscle damage.
Several other people in the UK have also reacted badly to false widow bites and lost fingers or needed skin grafts.
Pro tip: If you think you have been bitten by a false widow, have it checked out.
Public Service Anecdote: my wife worked in HR, a worker sat on a portable toilet in a job site. Bit by a spider, major damage developed in the resulting weeks, necrosis and all that. Big worker’s compensation. Pro tip? Don’t sit down.
Sorry to hear about your leg. Good reminder that the facade of our security and routine we so highly value in modern society can come crashing down for the seemingly smallest of reasons.
I used to work in the California oil fields, and one of our rig hands was bit by a black widow in the nether regions while using a porta-potty. Not Fun...
Tangentially related: Does anyone know the reason that both species have that frightening red hourglass / gang tattoo situation? Really adds to the general horror show of the situation.
I don't get the horror thing. If you live in North America, chances are they're all around you in woodpiles, rafters, wherever. You never see them because they run and hide.
I view them like perfectly engineered, self replicating, insect exterminators we might someday soon buy (with a cloud app): they work for you day and night keeping pests at bay and they do their darnedest to stay out of sight.
They are dangerous, though. I vividly remember my dad being intubated in the hospital when I was a young boy as the result of black widow bites. Got on the back of his neck in an attic and bit him several times when he felt something and tried to brush it off.
We shouldn’t be terrified of them, but a healthy respect is probably wise.
Like others are saying, there’s a huge risk of getting bit. I have a family member who was bit on the foot while cleaning his basement. He still walks with a limp 20 years later from the damage it did, and is lucky he didn’t lose his leg.
Other spiders get left alone around my house, but not widows.
Bingo. I personally hate spiders, I find them repugnant. But I love the idea of spiders and I hate flies and wasps orders of magnitude more. A spider will never go for my food while it's on my plate. That's why I never kill spiders. I often run into the little guys in my garage or outside my window and I always think it's because I was too fast and they didn't get a change to GTFO.
They tend to position themselves with the hourglass facing where birds would see it and be frightened away. The red is just for females. Male black widows are grayish brown with a bright yellow hourglass marking. Have not seen a male brown widow.
You managed to bring politics into a conversation about ...spiders?
Sigh.
And by the way, I lived in Texas for 17 years and never once saw someone "wave a gun around", and only once saw someone carrying openly.
I grew up in the north east though, and guns were everywhere, I remember going to a movie with my wife, standing in line for tickets and a gun fell out of the jacket of the man in front of me, who appeared to be a gang member.
But please, let's just keep with the knee-jerk political comments. Maybe we can bring them into a discussion about daffodils or something next.
they're in the same genus: as such, they essentially derive their DNA from a shared base class (so to speak), and perhaps they share the red tattoo dna.
Probably yes. But, I thought it is going to be about windows colors. That for some reason New Yorkers put brown windows instead of black ones into garages.
I was just coming to comment that I’m really torn about actually reading the article because I just know that it will ruin the amusement I’m getting out of the headline itself.
Edit: lol, didn’t even make the connection after reading your comment that it isn’t “windows”.
It's funny cause Brown Widows is literally the first two words but I swear my brain saw attic and garage at the same time and thought contextually Brown Windows makes more sense.
It's interesting how the other words in the sentence shape your expectations for even the first two words.
I think it has less to do with the words they follow and much more to do with the fact that Brown Windows is more common word combo than Brown Widows. Also for me I have been in the process of doing some home construction so windows are much more on my mind than spiders.
There was an episode of Loveline (the radio show) ~20-25 years ago where a young woman called in who grew up in a large mansion. Part of what she brought up was that there was a man who lived in the walls/unfinished spaces of the wing of the mansion her bedroom was in, and I believe that one of the exits from inside the walls just happened to be her bedroom closet. Basically every kid's worst nightmare.
Check out this wonderful, unforgettable spanish movie on that theme, much better than any plot summary could suggest (and also I don't want to give spoilers) : The Uninvited Guest (El habitante incierto)
Taking the theme to a fantastic extreme is the amazing french miniseries Beyond the Walls (Au-delà des murs), which has a whole bizarre world secretly living in your house.
I can't leave this set of foreign movie recommendations on the topic without a mention of the South Korean movie Parasite which won Best Picture in 2020 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6751668/
While they all can live in your house if unseen I think your parent really meant the allowed part of it.
As in they do acknowledge the usefulness of spiders in general while also being significantly creeped out by them.
Same here btw. And for other species too. Like ants. I acknowledge that they are very useful creatures so they can totally "dig up the lawn" and I don't care. They can also climb up the cherry trees and others and do their thing there as long as I get enough cherries to make jam and eat in summer. But as soon as even one sets foot in the house I try everything to kill said colony.
My rule is that they’re free wherever they roam but if they’re on my body I’m also free to be irrationally afraid until I get them somewhere safer. When I live with other humans, I try to encourage being similarly comfortable with their proximity, because I know they don’t much want contact with us either.
With my pup, I just hope they stay off the floor because I know their only hope is being faster than her attention and her curious mouth.
Mine get anywhere but the living area, then there’s some calculus around whether my partner sees it first and how many spiders I see in the house in a given period of time. Generally though I make efforts to put them outside unharmed.
We usually try to capture the ones we encounter and send them outside. If we find ourselves doing that again soon after for the same part of the house, we'll give that room an extra thorough cleaning, on the theory that the spiders have food because the spider food has food because of us.
That set of rules is as restrictive as it's possible to be. What is the operational difference between "cockroaches are free to live in my house, but they must remain unseen at all times" and "cockroaches are forbidden from living in my house"?
My approach is they're free to do whatever as long as they keep out of my way. That is, they're welcome to set up webs in ceiling corners, or in hard-to-reach areas that I forget exist. But if they try setting up a web near a place I frequent or things I often use, I'll give them a forceful relocation.
Subterranean termites are an interesting case. They usually live in a big colony that is not in your home, and just work in your home. And unless you live in a very sparsely populated area, that same colony is probably working from your neighbor's homes too.
When a pest control company deals with them in your home the poison they use is designed to not kill right away. It is defined to get on the ones in your home and be carried back to the colony with them where it spreads to all of them. Then when it kills it takes out the whole colony.
Note this means that even though they might be in several houses in the neighborhood whoever first discovers them in their house usually ends up paying to remove them from the whole neighborhood. That can cost a couple thousand dollars or more.
I wonder if anyone ever tries to take advantage of that? For example if you find you have subterranean termites give a neighbor or two gift certificates for a termite inspection, in the hope that one of them also has them and pays to get rid of them.
They really shouldn't be in multiple houses. The subterranean ones are supposed to create mud tubes up from ground to the wooden part of the house. Those should be noticeable for most people. There is another type, but those require a water source. So you'd need a leak in the exterior or in a pipe. It's fairly unlikely these circumstances present themselves at the same time for multiple houses in the vicinity.
What's the incentive for the pest company to do it that way, vs just kill the current ones/make the house unattractive (and thus expect probably to get business from some neighbours soon)?
