The Black Widow

(My most popular essay returns to this site after a lengthy absence.) 
  Angela Rotherman/Creative Commons
I hunt black widow spiders.  When I find one, I capture it.  I have found them in discarded car wheels and under railroad ties.  I have found them in house foundations and cellars, in automotive shops and tool sheds, against fences and in cinder block walls.  As a boy I used to lift the iron lids that guarded underground water meters, and there in the darkness of the meter-wells I would often see something round as a flensed human skull, glinting like chipped obsidian, scarred with a pair of crimson triangles that touched each other to form an hourglass: the widow as she looks in shadow.  A quick stir with a stick would trap her for a few seconds in her own web, long enough for me to catch her in a jar.  I have found widows on playground equipment, in a hospital, in the lair of a rattlesnake, and once on the bottom of the lawn chair I was sitting in as I looked at some widows I had captured elsewhere that day.
Sometimes I raise a generation or two in captivity.  An egg sac hatches hundreds of pinpoint cannibals, each leaving a trail of gleaming light in the air, the group of them eventually producing a glimmering tangle in which most of them die, eaten by stronger sibs.  Finally I separate the three or four survivors and feed them bigger game.
Once I let eleven egg sacs hatch out in a container about eighteen inches on a side, a tight wooden box with a sliding glass top.  As I tried to move the box one day, I tripped.  The lid slid off and I fell, hands first, into the mass of young widows.  Most were still translucent newborns, their bodies a swirl of cream and brown .  A few of the females were past their second molt; they had the beginnings of their blackness.  Tangles of broken web clung to my forearms.  The spiderlings felt like trickling water among my arm hairs.
I walked out into the open air and raised my arms into the stiff wind.  The widows answered the wind with new strands of web and drifted away, their bodies gold in the afternoon sun.  In about ten minutes my arms carried nothing but old web and the husks of spiderlings eaten by their sibs.
I have never been bitten.
*
The black widow has an ugly web.  The orb weavers make those seemingly delicate nets that poets have traditionally used as symbols of imagination, order, and perfection.  The sheet-web spiders weave crisp linens on grass and bushes.  But the widow makes messy-looking tangles in the corners and bends of things and under logs and debris.  Often the web is littered with leaves.  Beneath it lie the husks of insect prey, their antennae stiff as gargoyle horns, cut loose and dropped; on them and the surrounding ground are splashes of the spider's white urine, which looks like bird guano and smells of ammonia even at a distance of several feet.  This fetid material draws scavengers -- ants, crickets, roaches, and so on -- which become tangled in vertical strands of silk reaching from the ground to the main body of the web.  Sometimes these vertical strands break and recoil, hoisting the new prey as if on a bungee cord.  The widow comes down and, with a bicycling of the hind pair of legs, throws gummy silk onto the victim.
When the prey is seriously tangled but still struggling, the widow cautiously descends and bites the creature, usually on a leg joint.  This bite pumps neurotoxin into the victim, paralyzing it; it remains alive but immobile for what follows.  The widow delivers a series of bites as the creature’s struggles diminish, injecting digestive fluids.  Finally she will settle down to suck the liquefied innards out of the prey, changing position two or three times to get it all.
Before the eating begins, and sometimes before the slow venom quiets the victim, the widow usually moves the meal higher into the web.  She attaches some line to the prey with a leg-bicycling toss, moves up the vertical web-strand which originally snagged the prey, crosses a diagonal strand upward into the cross-hatched main body of the web, and here secures the line.  Then she hauls on the attached line to raise the prey so that its struggles cause it to touch other strands.  She has effectively moved a load with block and tackle.  The operation occurs in three dimensions -- as opposed to the essentially two-dimensional operations of the familiar orb-weavers.
You can't watch the widow in this activity very long without realizing that its web is not a mess at all, but an efficient machine.  It allows complicated uses of leverage, and also, because of its complexity of connections, lets the spider feel a disturbance anywhere in the web--usually with enough accuracy to tell the difference at a distance between a raindrop or leaf and viable prey.  The web is also constructed in a certain relationship to movements of air, so that flying insects are drawn into it. This fact partly explains why widow webs are so often found in the face-down side of discarded car wheels--the wheel is essentially a vault of still air that protects the web, but the central hole at the top allows airborne insects to fall in.  A clumsy flying insect, such as a June beetle, is especially vulnerable to this trap.
Widows adapt their webs to the opportunities of their neighborhoods.  Some choose building sites according to indigenous smells.  Webs turn up, for example, in piles of trash and rotting wood, the web holding together a camouflage of leaves, dirt, or bark.  A few decades ago, the widow was notorious for building its home in another odorous habitat--outdoor toilets.  Some people would habitually take a stick to the outhouse with them.  Before conducting the business for which they had come, they would scrape under the seat and inside the hole with the stick, listening carefully for a sound like the crackling of paper in fire.  This sound is unique to the widow's powerful web.  Anybody with a little experience can tell a widow's work from another spider's by ear.
Widows move around in their webs almost blind, yet they never misstep or get lost.  In fact, a widow knocked loose from its web does not seem confused; it will quickly climb back to its habitual resting place.  Furthermore, widows never snare themselves, even though every strand of the web, except for the scaffolding, is a potential trap.  A widow will spend a few minutes every day coating the clawed tips of its legs with the oil that lets it walk the sticky strands.  It secretes the oil from its mouth, licking its legs like a cat cleaning its paws.
The human mind cannot grasp the complex functions of the web, but must infer them.  The widow constructs it by instinct.  A ganglion smaller than a pinhead -- it’s too primitive to be called a brain -- contains the blueprints, precognitive memories the widow unfolds out of itself into actuality.  I have never dissected with enough precision or delicacy to get a good specimen of the black widow’s tiny ganglion, but I did glimpse one once.  A widow was struggling to wrap a mantid when the insect's forelegs, like scalpels mounted on lightning, sliced away the spider's carapace and left exposed among the ooze of torn venom sacs a clear droplet of bloody primitive brain.
*
Widows have been known to snare and eat mice, frogs, snails, tarantulas, lizards, snakes -- almost anything that wanders into that remarkable web.  I have never witnessed a widow performing a gustatory act of that magnitude, but I have seen them eat scarab beetles heavy as pecans, cockroaches more than an inch long, bumblebees, Mormon crickets, and hundreds of other arthropods of various sizes.  I have seen widows eat butterflies and ants that most spiders reject on the grounds of bad flavor.   I have seen them conquer spider-eating insects such as adult mantids and mud-dauber wasps. The combination of web and venom enables widows to overcome predators whose size and strength would otherwise overwhelm them.
Many widows will eat as much as opportunity gives.  One aggressive female had an abdomen a little bigger than an English pea.  She snared a huge cockroach and spent several hours subduing it, then three days consuming it.  Her abdomen swelled to the size of a largish marble, its glossy black stretching to a tight red-brown.  With a different widow, I decided to see whether that appetite was really insatiable.  I collected dozens of large crickets and grasshoppers and began to drop them into her web at a rate of one every three or four hours.  After catching and consuming her tenth victim, this bloated widow fell from her web, landing on her back.  She remained in this position for hours, making only feeble attempts to move.  Then she died.
The widow gets her name by eating her mate, though this does not always happen.  When a male matures with his last molt, he abandons his sedentary web-sitting ways.  He spins a little patch of silk and squeezes a drop of sperm-rich fluid onto it.  Then he sucks the fluid into the knobs at the end of his pedipalps and goes wandering in search females.  When he finds a web, he recognizes it as that of a female of the appropriate species by scent -- the female’s silk is laden with pheromones.  Before approaching the female, the male tinkers mysteriously at the edge of her web for a while, cutting a few strands, balling up the cut silk, and otherwise altering attachments.  Apparently he is sabotaging the web so the vibratory messages the female receives will be imprecise.  He thus creates a blind spot in her view of the world.  This tactic makes it harder for her to find and kill him.  Then he’s ready to approach her.  He distinguishes himself from ordinary prey by playing her web like a lyre, stroking it with his front legs and vibrating his belly against the strands.  Sometimes the female eats the male without first copulating; sometimes she snags him as he withdraws his palp from her genital pore; sometimes he leaves unharmed after mating.  I have even witnessed male and female living in apparently platonic relationships in one web.
Mating is the last thing a male does.  Once he’s left his web to seek mates, he never eats again; and whether he finds females or not, he is already wasting away, collapsing toward his preordained life-limit, which is marked by the coming of the cold.
*
The first thing people ask when they hear about my fascination with the widow is why I am not afraid.  The truth is that my fascination is rooted in fear.
I have childhood memories that partly account for my fear.  When I was six my mother took my sister and me to the cellar of our farmhouse and told us to watch as she killed a widow.  With great ceremony she produced a long stick (I am tempted to say a ten-foot pole) and, narrating her technique in exactly the hushed voice she used for discussing religion or sex, went to work.  Her flashlight beam found a point halfway up the cement wall where two marbles hung together -- one crisp white, the other a glossy black.  My mother ran her stick through the dirty silver web around them, and as it tore she made us listen to the crackle.  The black marble rose on thin legs to fight off the intruder.  As the plump abdomen wobbled across the wall, it seemed to be constantly throwing those legs out of its path.  It gave the impression of speed and frantic anger, but actually a widow's movements outside the web are slow and inefficient.  My mother smashed the widow onto the stick and carried it up into the light.  It was still kicking its remaining legs.  She scraped it against the sidewalk, grinding it to a paste.  Then she returned for the white marble -- the widow's egg sac.  This, too, came to an abrasive end.
My mother's purpose was to teach us how to recognize and deal with a dangerous creature we would probably encounter on the farm.  But of course we also took the understanding that widows were actively malevolent, that they waited in dark places to ambush us, that they were worthy of ritual disposition, like an enemy whose death is not sufficient but must be followed with the murder of his children and the salting of his land and whose unclean remains must not touch our hands.
The odd thing is that so many people, some of whom presumably did not first encounter the widow in such an atmosphere of mystic reverence, hold her in awe.  Various friends have told me that the widow always devours her mate, or that her bite is always fatal to humans--in fact, it rarely is, especially since the development of an antivenin.  I have heard told for truth that goods imported from Asia are likely infested with widows and that women with Bouffant hairdos have died of widow infestation.  Any contradiction of such tales is received as if it were a proclamation of atheism.
Scientific researchers are not immune to the widow’s mythic aura.  The most startling contribution to the widow's mythical status I’ve ever encountered was Black Widow: America's Most Poisonous Spider, a book by Thorpe and Woodson that appeared in 1945.  This book enjoyed respect in scientific circles.  It was cited in scientific literature for decades after it appeared; its survey of medical cases and laboratory experiments was thorough.  However, between their responsible scientific observations, the authors present the widow as a lurking menace with a taste for human flesh.  “Mankind must now make a unified effort toward curtailment of the greatest arachnid menace the world has ever known,” they proclaim.  The widow population is exploding, they announce with scant evidence, making it a danger of enormous urgency.  They describe certain experiments conducted in the name of making the world safe from widows; one involved inducing a widow to bite a laboratory rat on the penis, after which event the rat “appeared to become dejected and depressed.”  Perhaps the most psychologically revealing passage is the authors' quotation from another writer, who said the "deadliest Communists are like the black widow spider; they conceal their redunderneath."
We project our archetypal terrors onto the widow.  It is black; it avoids the light; it is a voracious carnivore.  Its red markings suggest blood.  Its name, its sleek, rounded form, invite a strangely sexual discomfort; the widow becomes an emblem for a man's fear of extending himself into the blood and darkness of a woman, something like the vampire of Inuit legend that takes the form of a fanged vagina.
*
The widow's venom is, of course, a soundly pragmatic reason for fear.  It contains a neurotoxin that can produce sweats, vomiting, swelling, convulsions, and dozens of other symptoms.  The variation in symptoms from one person to the next is remarkable.  The constant is pain.  A useful question for a doctor trying to diagnose an uncertain case: “Is this the worst pain you’ve ever felt?”  A “yes” suggests a diagnosis of black widow bite.  Occasionally people die from widow bites.  The very young and the very old are especially vulnerable.  Some people die not from the venom but from the complications that may follow a bite--stroke, tetanus, gangrene.
Some early researchers hypothesized that the virulence of the venom was necessary for killing scarab beetles.  The scarab family contains thousands of species, including the June beetle and the famous dung beetle the Egyptians thought immortal.  All the scarabs have thick, strong bodies and tough exoskeletons, and many of them are common prey for the widow.  The tough hide was supposed to require a particularly nasty venom.  As it turns out, the widow’s venom is thousands of times more virulent than necessary for killing scarabs.  The whole idea is full of the widow's glamor: an emblem of eternal life killed by a creature whose most distinctive blood-colored markings people invariably describe as an hourglass.
No one has ever offered a sufficient explanation for the dangerous venom.  It provides no clear evolutionary advantage: all of the widow's prey items would find lesser toxins fatal, and there is no particular benefit in killing or harming larger animals.  A widow that bites a human being or other large animal is likely to be killed.  Evolution does sometimes produce such flowers of natural evil -- traits that are neither functional nor vestigial, but utterly pointless.  Natural selection favors the inheritance of useful characteristics that arise from random mutation and tends to extinguish disadvantageous traits.  All other characteristics, the ones that neither help nor hinder survival, are preserved or extinguished at random as mutation links them with useful or harmful traits.  Many people--even many scientists --assume that every animal is elegantly engineered for its ecological niche, that every bit of an animal's anatomy and behavior has a functional explanation.  However, nothing in evolutionary theory sanctions this assumption.  Close observation of the lives around us rules out any view so systematic.
We want the world to be an ordered room, but in a corner of that room there hangs an untidy web.  Here the analytical mind finds an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in nature; and the scientist's vision of evil comes to match the vision of a God-fearing country woman with a ten-foot pole.  No idea of the cosmos as elegant design accounts for the widow.  No idea of a benevolent God is comfortable in a world with the widow.  She hangs in her web, that marvel of design, and defies teleology.


This essay appears, in a much-expanded form, in my collection The Red Hourglass.