Young people, the elderly, and those with weakened immune systems are more susceptible to serious complications and death from a black widow spider bite.
Black widow spiders are reclusive and not aggressive. Instead, they only bite in self-defense or when they feel threatened. Black widow spiders live in dark, hidden spots, such as in piles of rocks, leaves, or wood. Black widow spiders may live in these areas. Treatment for a black widow bite will vary depending on your health, symptoms, and the severity of the bite.
You may be given medication to help ease your pain. You might also be given medications to help lower the high blood pressure that sometimes accompanies a black widow spider bite. If the bite is more severe, you may need muscle relaxants or antivenom, which is an antitoxin used to treat venomous bite. In some cases, you may even need to be hospitalized. There are some steps you can take immediately preceding your trip to the hospital or on the way to the hospital.
Some spider bites can lead to serious complications if left untreated. Hobo spiders are found in the Pacific Northwestern United States. Learn more about what they look like and if you should worry about a hobo spider…. Learn about the symptoms of a brown recluse spider bite and how to prevent getting bitten. Most spiders are harmless, but that doesn't make them any less creepy.
Learn how to spot venomous spiders, get rid of spiders, and prevent an…. Peppermint oil is a natural insecticide. Spiders aren't technically insects, but they seem to hate the oil all the same. Here's what you should know…. The western black widow Latrodectus Hesperus is indigenous to grape-growing regions in California, as well as British Columbia and other western regions of North America.
These spiders are a common sight in vineyards, where they typically build their large, tangled webs near grape plants, Scott told Live Science. And yet, black widows do sometimes end up in people's kitchens. If a spider beats the odds and survives being plucked from its vineyard home, vigorously washed and then packed into a box, there's a chance it could travel all the way to your local grocery store and, eventually, into your home, said Todd Blackledge, a biology professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.
Bananas are another fruit that often harbor stowaway spiders though the so-called banana spiders that hitch a ride on fruit from Central America are almost always harmless , Blackledge told Live Science. As with any kind of produce, you should wash grapes and even bananas in cold, running water before peeling and eating them, according to the U. Food and Drug Administration. Who knows, maybe this small step can also help you wash any lingering black widows right down the drain.
Despite their ferocious-sounding name, black widows are not aggressive creatures, said Scott, adding that a better word to describe these spiders is "shy. The Vermont woman recently bitten by a black widow spider lurking among her grapes likely reached her hand directly into the bag and accidentally squished the spider hiding inside, Scott said. In other words, the spider likely wasn't just sitting on a grape, ready to pounce at any moment.
In fact, you really have to pinch a western black widow to get it to sink its teeth in, said Scott, who referenced a recent study that found that this species of spider is most likely to bite when it's pinched along the entire length of its body something that might happen if it is attacked by a predator or sat upon by an unsuspecting human.
In most cases, poking the spider repeatedly with a finger wasn't enough to get the arachnid to bite, the researchers found. Instead, the prodded black widows in the study often ran away, played dead or flicked a few strands of silk at their attackers. Black widows earned their name because scientists witnessed the females eat their mates after copulation. But research has shown that in a related species, redback spiders, females only cannibalize their mates about two percent of the time, so experts suspect that American black widows have similar rates of cannibalism in the wild.
Male black widows also have strategies to avoid riskier sexual encounters in the first place; for instance, research suggests they can tell whether or not a female is hungry by her pheromones, so they can avoid potential mates who seem a bit peckish. And some related species take an aggressive approach. All of the spiders in the Latrodectus genus have a few things in common: curved feet covered in bristles, earning them the name comb-footed spiders, and messy, irregular nests of silk called tangle webs.
Western black widows take two different strategies to build their webs depending on how well-fed they are: starving spiders build more sticky threads, which snag prey, and healthy spiders invest more time in supporting threads, which may stop them from overeating. The spiders rely on strands of silk in their tangle webs as extensions of their own senses.
Thousands of organs called slit sensilla, which look like cracks in the exoskeleton and are especially common on their leg joints, feel vibrations in the silk. By changing its posture, a spider changes the shape of the slit sensilla, so a black widow can tune its senses to certain frequencies of vibrations coming down its web.
The insects hunted by black widows want to avoid falling into their jaws. So as the black widows evolved, they needed to strike a balance between hiding from prey and warning predators off.
Colorado College spider researcher Nicholas Brandley conducted experiments with 3D-printed widows showed that bright red spots protected the fake spiders from bird attacks, he told Smithsonian magazine in Unadorned plastic spiders were attacked three times more often than the red-spotted ones. In another experiment, a live black widow with many red spots tended to build its web higher up in terrariums than its less-colorful counterpart.
The extra spots may give it more protection from predators up high and lurking below. Black widows are most common in the warm environments of the southern and southwestern United States. Instead, black widows find a protected area and go into a dormant state called overwintering.
In spring, they emerge, and the tricky business of mating begins.
0コメント