Dancing With Black Widow Spiders [View all]

[Jesus Malverde]

I lay on my back with my teeth clenched and my hands gripping the sides of a hospital bed. A crowd of strangers in white coats filled the tiny room. Waves of pain lapped from my abdomen into my chest as the venom worked its way toward my heart.

An experimental antivenin drug was about to be injected into my bloodstream, and while I waited for the needle to go in, I reflected that if anyone in the world was the right person to be bitten by a black widow spider, I was that guy.

As a professional outdoorsman, I spend a lot of time around things that can bite, claw, stab or otherwise attack me. I have been lucky with snakes and reckless with bears. I have had some close calls with lionfish. It figures that the thing to finally nail me would be living on my own front porch.

The black widow’s graceful form and red hourglass marking have made it America’s most recognizable spider. The Eastern species, Latrodectus mactans, is common from Florida to New York and as far west as Texas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/dancing-with-black-widows.html?pagewanted=all