Steatoda Nobilis- deadly threat or nice pet?

Thread Starter

takao21203

Joined Apr 28, 2012
3,702
http://www.flickr.com/groups/spidersathome/

During the past few years there has been a surge in Steatoda population here in Ireland, maybe due to global warming.

I saw various news reports they bite people, and they eventually killed a small rabbit. It is nonsense, they never bite, stay in their webs all the time, and can be handled easily.

A school in the UK was gassed even.
 

loosewire

Joined Apr 25, 2008
1,686
None of the pictures show the under side ,if it has a hour glass shape on the under side

it could kill a rabbit. They would gas a school to protect the kids from a deadly spider.

Make sure you are naming the spiders right ,if it has a hour glass on the under side it

can harm an adult. We had a member disappear from the site after being bitten by

a brown recluse spider ,he had skin falling off his arm and being disfirgured.....so be

sure about your spiders.
 

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
I saw a brown recluse wound. The "bullseye" of necrosis was blatantly obvious. If you have even read about this kind of bite, you will recognize it instantly.
 

Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,415
I like spiders myself, though I wouldn't want to find one in my bed. Unlike insects, they have personality.

You know the most exciting part of sex for a black widow male?

Living to do it again afterwards (rare that).
 

Miss Kelly

Joined Nov 9, 2013
6
Ordinarily I consider spiders to be good luck. I made an exception in the case of the brown recluse we found in the basement. It went to the great web in the sky. I didn't want ER visits for the hubby, me, or the kitties. And I don't love the smell of necrosis in the morning.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,978
I went and looked at the wikipedia article on this spider and have a hard time seeing how anyone could mistake it for a black widow. Though I suppose that could be because around here black widow spiders are truly black -- maybe there are other variations elsewhere.

I grew up with black widows -- we had a particular window well in our basement that was the nest for several of them for a number of years. A couple times a year we would see them elsewhere in the house. Sometimes I would catch them in a jar, but most of the time we would simply kill them. A couple of times I woke up with one crawling on me in bed and both times I was able to fling it off (mostly an automatic reaction) and then chase it down and kill it. No one ever got bit, but that was certainly a possibility. At our present house I've only seen black widows twice, but we have false widows that really do look like black widows and it took catching several of them and examining them under a microscope to convince myself that they weren't black widows. Though I've since learned that black widows don't always have the classic hourglass marking, so who knows. I figure better safe than sorry, so I do NOT adopt a live-and-let-live strategy with anything that remotely looks like a black widow.

But I certainly wouldn't have my house gassed over it and I wouldn't recommend gassing a school even if true black widows were known to exist there as long as they aren't so dense that encounters are frequent enough to be a real concern.
 

tindel

Joined Sep 16, 2012
936
Black widows are pretty common here in CO. We've had a few close calls with black widows, but have never been bit. I've always lived by the 'only good spider is a dead spider' rule. Any spider is pretty hard to kill without manual extermination (aka squashing them). Black widow webs are pretty recognizable compared to other webs because there is no pattern... they also make cottonball looking webs that should be torn down immediately when found... those are nests.

Speaking of nests - as a kid we were moving and we knew we had some black widows living in our grill... so we packed it up in the UHAUL... and when dad opened the UHAUL to get something out... there were literally thousands of baby black widows floating away in the breeze... It was one of the coolest and scariest things I had seen in my whole life. Dad said that maybe only one or two would survive of the entire nest. Dad was a pest control guy in the late 80's so he learned a lot about them when we lived in Phoenix.

Black widows REALLY like the sprinkler valve boxes outside... moist and dark... I hate opening those things in the spring and fall. I'm also careful of valve boxes for the rattlesnake factor too! I've never seen one in there, but it's where I'd want to live if I was a snake of some sort.
 

Thread Starter

takao21203

Joined Apr 28, 2012
3,702
Ordinarily I consider spiders to be good luck. I made an exception in the case of the brown recluse we found in the basement. It went to the great web in the sky. I didn't want ER visits for the hubby, me, or the kitties. And I don't love the smell of necrosis in the morning.
Recluse has a bad habit to rest inside clothing items, while Steatoda actually likes cupboards, ceiling corners, and window sills. Once it makes a web, chances to disturb humans are little. A few times spiders dropped down in the night one time on my head.

One time I really got bitten. A spider was sitting for a while inside my hair behind the ear. After a while I became irritated and crushed it too much. After biting, it was sitting on my hand and did not move much. Maybe it died.

Spiders and humans can coexist but Recluse is problematic because necrosis.
 

Thread Starter

takao21203

Joined Apr 28, 2012
3,702
My transistors work better without spiders. Please keep them at your house.
I have no control over them, they come and go as they like.
I don't manufacture them I don't run a spider farm.

I have not sent them inside a school in the UK to drop down during class (7th grade) and stalk the female teacher.

However when I went to a class in 2007, one day a very large black spider emerged from nowhere and was just sitting there on the wall.

When you see one spider there may be 50 others already hiding prefering not to be seen.
 
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