The pain may also spread to the abdomen, producing stomach cramping and nausea, according to the factsheet. Major changes coming to historic museum in City Park The CSU factsheet offers several tips to monitor for symptoms of a venomous bite.Ī slight swelling and redness may develop at the bite site, and muscle and chest pain or tightness is the most common reaction to the toxin. Widow spiders have to be provoked in a highly specific manner in order to induce them to bite a human, Cranshaw stated.Ĭushing also said a lot of black widow bites could be asymptomatic, as the spider might bite without injecting venom. “Thus, it is unlikely that males, even if encountered, could penetrate the skin of an adult human.” “Being smaller than the females, they have smaller venom glands and smaller fangs,” Whitney Cranshaw, professor emeritus at CSU, stated in the factsheet. Male widows, the ones wandering trying to find mates, are even less likely to hurt a person. The Colorado State University Extension concurs with Cushing, and further states in a fact sheet that black widows rarely ever bite when not in a web. The spider is just trying to protect itself from getting squished, and it would rather run away than waste time biting a person. “They can’t eat a human, so bites are really, really rare.”īites that do occur could come from someone moving a flower pot or some furniture and hitting one. “Black widows don’t like to waste their metabolically expensive venom on something they can’t eat,” she said. With the boom in black widow activity, it is good to stay vigilant about some contact with black widows, but Cushing said it’s actually pretty rare for them to try and bite a human. Western black widows do best in dry climates, and she has not seen any papers or research about humid seasons improving black widow populations.īlack widow populations are pretty healthy at this time every year. Some spider populations could see an increase, but Cushing said that’s probably not happening with black widows. The western black widow, the only widow species native to Colorado and the only spider species that can harm a person with its venom, is entering the reproductive phase of its life cycle, so more are out and about looking for mates.īut with the humid summer increasing insect populations, could black widows also be on the rise in the state? They’re “just looking for a good time,” Cushing said. So, why does it seem more black widows are around and even inside right now? A black widow spider shows off her characteristic hourglass markings. Residents may even start seeing them more and more and think their house or the city itself might be overrun with the little black spiders with the red hourglass shape on their undersides, but Paula Cushing, a senior curator of invertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who specializes in arachnology, said that’s probably not the case. The weather gets cooler and temperatures start dropping below freezing, so it only seems natural spiders and other creepy crawlies that are getting inside are trying to escape the chill. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menuīlack widow spiders are no stranger to Colorado, but does it seem like there are always more around this time of year?
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