I was rather surprised to find this critter hiding under my barbecue grill cover last weekend. I knew that Black Widow spiders could be found in Texas but I had only ever seen one before and that was quite a distance from Austin so I rather assumed that they didn’t live around here. Apparently I was wrong.
As a child, I had this great poster hung in my bedroom. The title was “The World’s 7 Deadliest Creatures” and slapped right in the middle was a large graphic of a Black Widow spider. Despite this prominent placement, I gather that bites are very rare and deaths are extremely uncommon. Nonetheless, I’m going to be a lot more careful when starting up the grill in future!
Wow Dave! Great shot! I’m pretty sure I would’ve had a shot of a splattered Black Widow!
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I’m a soft touch unless I’ve already been bitten or stung by something. If this had been a scorpion or a wasp, it would not have survived long after the photo session. In this case, though, I relocated the spider deep into the woods instead. Call me a wimp if you want 🙂
Nice capture, I believe they are all over an Texas, Arizona and all those areas, we even have them as far up as here in southern Kansas. They are rare to spot, they like to hide and not be seen. But yet I believe I seen 6-7 of them in the 12yrs I lived here. Brown recluse on the other side even though they are reclusive I see twice that many just in a single summer.
Eje,
I know to keep an eye open for Brown Recluse spiders but I’ve never actually found one of them (despite spending quite a bit of time looking – I have a bug-obsessed kid so we spend a lot of time turning over rocks). I’ve seen only 1 other Black Widow in Texas and that was 5 years ago. Prior to that, I remember seeing my first one in Arizona about 25 years ago and being rather freaked out that this “world’s deadliest creature” would be on an apartment balcony and that my aunt would be sweeping it out of the way with a broom rather than calling in a highly trained SWAT team! 🙂
That’s a fabulous catch Dave… I would like to capture an image of one, but I’m not sure I’d live comfortably in a place where I could catch an image of one on my backyard. What you didn’t tell me before I moved to Scotland is that you have some huge and very fast ones around here in Summer… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_house_spider