Brown Widow Spiders

I'm infamous! (But we already knew that.)

Sunday August 17th over break I was cleaning my porch when I found a bunch of brown spiders with messy webs. I was brushing them away when one flipped over and there was a bright orange hour glass. I froze!

When you see an hour glass on a spider, you automatically think of one thing-- a Black Widow. But these were brown? I remember, as a kid, reading about Widow spiders and the variations between them. They can have red, orange, or white hour glasses, or triangles rather than an hourglass, or an hour glass or triangle and a spot, or no markings at all.

Then, taking a study break late at school, I was boasting about my find to a friend, who pointed to a spider web on the picnic table we were sitting at. I, to my friend's dismay, crawled under the bench with my trusty pen light to examine them. When I came back up for air I exclaimed in excitement, "more brown widows!" We decided to get off the bench before were were bitten and had to be care-flighted to San Juan.

I contacted a few Widow spider experts and naturalists specializing in the local flora and fauna of St Kitts. I learned that no one on St Kitts (ie the hospital, the head of medicine, the naturalists, and the locals) had any idea that these poisonous spiders were on St Kitts! I did run across a spider lady on Trinidad who came here in ealy 2007 for a survey of St Kitts spiders. She mentions finding the spiders in an article (Sewlal 2008) that came out this week, but didn't mention it to anyone here. (Why?!?)

A spider expert in Florida explained "But their reputation as venomous is overblown. Although brown widows are 2x more potent, drop for drop, than southern black widows, the black widows inject approximately 3x as much venom, therefore are more dangerous. And black widows are more aggressive and will defend their webs, unlike brown widows. They are in fact very timid spiders toward people, and rarely bite. And black widows are more aggressive and will defend their webs, unlike brown widows."

I was excited anyway. The media center guy on campus helped me take pictures of the brown widows on campus and load them on to Wikipedia. I didn't change any of the wording.