A Morning Surprise

[alanro]

The first thing shikzoid noticed when she opened the hatch to the crawl space this morning to allow the repairman access to the furnace was a large Black Widow spider on the underside of the hatch door. Even hearing about this freaked me out... I had not known that Black Widow spiders could survive in this cold a climate

Comments

[shelleybear]

Do they really have the hourglasses on their tummies?
Make a great Carebear parody.

[athenais]

I'll be staying at the Best Western...

Well, okay, I guess the pest control people probably did their job right, but yaaaaaaaaaaa!

[alanro]

No worries, the house is safe for you now... But the spider in shikzoid's icon is actual size. If I had discovered it without any warning, I would most likely have dropped the hatch on my foot. And the hatch weighs about fifty pounds...

[kalimac]

Strangely, this news doesn't frighten me away from your house. Can't speak for B., though.

[dmw]

eh, black widows are more or less the same as redbacks. alone they don't bother me, it's only in terrifying heinleinian nests of dozens that i freak out. i'm told that vancouver is the black widow capital of the world, so finding 'em in seattle is probably not strange. black widows and redbacks are both almost always only found in and around human habitation, interestingly.

[alanro]

That would surprise me, as I've always associated black widows with the drier areas of California. But they do tend to gravitate towards human habitation, especially basements and crawl spaces beneath houses.

[randy_byers]

I'd heard that there were black widows around Seattle, but I've never seen one myself. And I've called my basement bedroom the Kingdom of the Spiders in the past, because there were so many spiders in it. Spiders are your friends! (Or at least that's what I keep telling myself.)