Scary visitor… the cousin returned at night

he widows have a egg sack that is light tan-pale yellow with spikes all over it.  That's usually the first thing I see.  The web strands are stronger with the brown widows than most spiders and they forn a kind of tunnel that they hide in or are at the mouth of a tube or other similar object.  Sometimes they hide inside long recesses on our issued recycle and trash bins where the giveaway is the web lines they put out.

You'll find more of the buzz tails in the alfalfa fields and the rocky ridges out there.  Once in a while in the sagebrush

So, speaking of scary visitors,   I saw my ex-wife the other day .  .  .

I used to get bit occasionally when I installed cable, mostly when working under the house. One time I gota series of bites, probably four, on the back of my neck. The bug must have been stuck between my shirt collar and my neck. Anyway, it hurt and itched like a case of shingles for about a week, then apparently healed up. It wasn't going to kill me, but it wasn't particularly comfortable either. 

Actually, and rather surprisingly, I live in the high desert now, where we have lots of spiders, yet I rarely see snakes, and even more rarely see dangerous snakes. Frankly that surprises me.

I have never seen a black widow web in any living spaces either.  They are not aggressive, and avoid any and all contact with other animals, including humans.  The only time people get bitten is through accidental contact, such as putting on an article of clothing that has been in an isolated area...or when doing work in those isolated areas and getting into accidental contact with one.  I have been bitten by one while working in the crawlspace under my mother's house, fixing a pipe which was up in the floor joists.  I knocked it loose from its nest without knowing it was there and it fell inside my shirt.  Its a pretty powerful neurotoxin in their bite, and it is almost unheard of for anybody to have just a mild reaction.  In my case, it was an intense pain from muscle spasms all the way up my left arm into my chest.  Felt like my arm was being crushed in a vise.  I also had a lot of bleeding under the skin around the bite that caused a HUGE, dark blue-black, circular patch around the bite.  That, fortunately, was only temporary due to the small amount of hemotoxin that is also in their venom.

Strange - living in CA we have widows a pleanty.  They aren't the type of spider to go on walk about.  They sit in dark corners and have very messy webs.  I take care when moving boxes etc in the garage.  After 57 years I've never seen a widow in the house.

You sure it was a widow?  Usually the bite causes some severe problems with the skin and its neuraltoxin properties that can last for some time.  It could have been a more common house spider or a wolf or recluse.Here we have two types of widow spiders, the black which is heavily armored and a bit slow and the brown or red which is larger and faster, both with the hourglass marking.

stikpusher

 

 

Justinryan215

 

 

Flight Line Media

Oh, I think that's poisonous! Please keep safe, Stikpusher. :)

 

 

 

 

 

venemous.  Not poisonous.

 

 

 

 

My bug man told me that this type is the giant desert hairy scorpion. Looked it up and they are the largest in North America. But, their venom is only akin to that of the common honey bee, with the commensurate pain and danger. Sure makes me feel a bit easier about these critters.

 

i don't remember where I heard it, but I do remem hearing that if you are gonna get stung by a scorpion, you want to be stung by a big one, because the bigger they are, the less potent the venom, the smaller they are the more potent the venom...

but, the point of my comment still stands; venomous, not poisonous.  Poisonous is if the toxin is ingested (or somehow passively spread), and venomous is when the toxin is injected...

Justinryan215

 

 

Flight Line Media

Oh, I think that's poisonous! Please keep safe, Stikpusher. :)

 

 

 

 

 

venemous.  Not poisonous.

 

My bug man told me that this type is the giant desert hairy scorpion. Looked it up and they are the largest in North America. But, their venom is only akin to that of the common honey bee, with the commensurate pain and danger. Sure makes me feel a bit easier about these critters.

Flight Line Media

Oh, I think that's poisonous! Please keep safe, Stikpusher. :)

 

venomous.  Not poisonous.

In South East Asia we would call those things rice bugs.  They were quite popular with the locals, but ours had a long tooth thaqt sat dead center.  One night on patrol in my jeep I saw a base defense stopped near teh perimeter fence and the guys were walking arouind looking for something.  As it turned out the G.I. driver was collection rice bugs to take downtown after he got off shift.  He would use them as barter to pick up a woman.  Evidently they were used as a seasoning for certain dishes and not easily found in town.  I have seen my local marine associates sometimes will just snap the heads off and suck out the rest.

I have seen them in Arkansas near the rice patties between the base and Little ROck itself and everyonce in a while I might find one in the parking lot outside where I used to work.  But its only been about three in almost 20 years.

And if the 7-footer looks like Dwayne Johnson, run - you're in a terrible movie!

Same thing if you hear someone whisper "anytime".

Yikes,

Maybe you should "take off and nuke the site from orbit - it's the only way to be sure"

armornut

now watch yer back, a seven foot beast with really sharp objects is watching.

I had better get myself a good sword then...

   That is so COOL Stik, glad they are in your back ysrd and not mine lol. Exactly the look I was talking about.....now watch yer back, a seven foot beast with really sharp objects is watching.

That's the way we used to hunt them, back in the day. I used to sell them to the science lab at ASU for my beer money (of course I was in high school back then) but hey, you do what you must .  .  .!   It was good money too.

Looks like all the porch and security lights are going to be replaced with ultraviolet

armornut

To bad you couldn't use a filter and make it look like the critter from Predator.

This is as close as I could do for that.... Went out scorpion hunting with the black light tonite, since another one turned up dead in the yard on Monday. Found this guy running around! 

A little smaller than the one I killed the other day. I chased this one out of the yard…

Cats are great for keeping scorpions at bay,imune to the sting.

Sorry guys I didn't buy the scorpion - it would have been more OT:

https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/image/10583257

Stik: I was going to say the same thing!

The little one looks like what we call hellgrammites.  Found under rocks in riffles.  Great trout bait when they won't take anything.  Big the adults are a fly, nothing like your Asian friend

Real G

And yet...you have to imagine that there's someone, somewhere, thinking 

"Man...I bet that would be good on a toasted bun...."

Oh, I think that's poisonous! Please keep safe, Stikpusher. :)

Almost sounds as mean as the Brain Bug in Starship Troopers movie...

Hey, for those who don't know what a giant water bug looks like, here ya go:

These nasty aqua-roaches grasp their prey with their forelimbs and then use a peircing proboscis to inject enzymes that turn their victims into a gruesome juice box to be sucked dry.  They will attack and eat anything they can subdue, including fish and small amphibians.

I have strange taste in hobbies, I know.

I live in a suburb of Chicago. I really love those Winter days when it gets down to 20 below zero. Why you may ask? Because that temperature will kill a whole lot of bugs.

Dodgy

 

 

Glamdring

That is the only thing I like about living in a cold weather state, it keeps the creepy crawlies to a more manageable size.  My family in Arizona would always tell stories of tarantulas, wolf spiders, black widows, and scorpions.  I'd love to go visit, but as an arachnaphobe I think it would be a vacation spent in a constant state of paranoia.

 

 

 

 

If you don't like spiders Glamdring, you're not gonna like Aussie. Don't have tarantulas or black widows, but we have funnel webs, redbacks, wolf spiders and all sorts of bitey things. The most common are huntsman spiders. They can grow as big as your hand and love to hang out inside houses and sheds. Luckily they are not poisonous. They do bite however and move like greased lightning. They also have a habbit of dropping from ceilings and door frames. Fun.

 

Yes, there too!  I recall Peter Jackson used a funnel web spider as his basis for Shelob in the Lord of the Rings movies.  When I learned that fact, it immediately quashed my desire to go to the land down under!