The Female black widow spider (Latrodectus Mactans) is a small to medium sized spider. It can be tiny but not always and I have yet to spot one tarantula size. All though I have seen widows big enough to make me run like hell. She is shiny jet black with a small thorax and a corrispondingly huge abdomen. It is usually ball shaped but I have seen some that were more like an arrow head. She is always shiny black and will always have a marking on the lower underside of her abdomen. Usually blood red but sometimes kind of burnt orange like the brown widow. It wont always be a solid hourglass. Sometimes two arrows pointing towards each other. Sometimes two spaced out horizontal bars.

She will USUALLY do whatever she can to escape danger and not attack, for fear of being crushed. But if she is guarding her egg sack (several tiny silky spherical shaped web pieces at the back of the web) YOU BETTER STAY BACK AND KEEP YOUR FINGERS TO YOURSELF! If she does attack her venom is deadly and she is extremely fast. I have been bitten and it is extremely painful and I wanted to die.

People please do not post information on black widows based on your opinion. Your opinion is not going to save anyone’s life if they are bitten. Please make sure your posting proven fact. To bite victims reading this, the information published on here can mean their life or death. People if you are bitten by a spider that meets the above description, get to an emergency room IMMEDIATELY.

That afternoon and for the next few days I had a bad headache and flu-like symptoms, but as I have fibromyalgia and am 57 thought I must just be overtired. Two weeks later I had whole-body symptoms, very bad cramping in my arms, not as severe in my legs, and it took some thinking to connect that bite with the symptoms. Went to my doctor to get her opinion, and from her and other medical folks was pretty sure I was right, especially after finding the Ontario Outdoors website which confirmed the presence of back-widows where I was.

I am still suffering from muscle cramps in my arms, and very tired from all these months of discomfort and trouble sleeping,etc. Have been enough better the past month or so that I only need painkillers at night for sleep. The symptoms seem more or less random now, sometimes my lower back, sometimes legs, but always arms.

Reading all these comments gives me the most reassurance that I will get over it eventually. Thanks!

My conclusions were astounding. Widows are not out to attack humans and frankly there afraid of them. Back in the late 80s my oldest daughter and I would hunt them at night and we found they would always run into there hole or nearest hiding place, and another fact I learned was believe it or not, after time some of the Widows would actually begin to recognize us and not run. Now believe that if you want. The bottom line is, if they have a nest or otherwise commonly known as an egg sac, leave them alone. Yes they will attack, I’ve seen it. Like any mother there just protecting there off spring. Also if there in your way sure, use common sense

I could go on and on and I realize some of this does sound crazy but after I finally faced my fear with them i’m all right. Just respect them.

I am fully recovered, and except for the scar on my arm, OK.
I am 61 years old and in relatively good health.

We made an apt. with the Orkin man.

Five days later, in the evening, in our hallway off of the living room, we found another Black widow, scurrying across the floor. Thank goodness my husband had just arrived home, our infant was less than four feet away and it was coming in her general direction, with her two brothers laying on the floor of the dimly lit living room, watching movies and eating snacks. This one to was tossed in the freezer.

That next week the Orkin man arrived and inspected the home. He was horrified with the spiders and highly suggested a spider treatment. They arrived six days later. They treated every possible place and laid traps to find migratory paths.

Six days later………again, my husband finds a good sized black widow, waltzing from the top of our basement stairs, heading for our mainfloor bathroom. This one too, was tossed with the other two, into the freezer…..and the Orkin man returned to spray again.

It was at this time he informed us that the highly concentrated spray and the window dusting, beads around the house had virtually NO impact on the spiders itself. Black Widows are equipped with pads on the bottom of their feet that protects them as they walk throughout the chemicals. Furthermore, black widows do not clean themselves as roaches, ants, and community based bugs (spiders in general do not groom themselves) do. This means that they do not in fact ingest the poison until they eat a bug that had the treatment, dust, etc. on them, or groomed themselves and subsequently has ingested the poison, or when the spider feeds off of a dead bug that has died due to the poison. My peace of mind flew right out the window. (Not enough to stop out 500$ year long contract with Orkin)

Learning all this I have realized, I will continue to randomly not sleep or have recurring nightmares as long as we live here. My solice comes from knowing this is a temporary, three year living situation. My family is from the MN/ND area, where things die in the winter. We have decided as a family our next move MUST have snow. I’ll email my pictures of the spiders, hopefully for all to see.

But really, if you see a bug, KILL IT. I know of no American bugs on the endangered list, and Black widows can lay 200-700 eggs in their lifetime. The odds are in their favor.

I realized it wasn’t a fly, tensed up and brushed at it again, quickly, and it fell onto my daughter’s quilt. As I brushed at it the second time, I felt how large it was, and rushed to turn on the light. When I saw the huge spider crawling across my daughter’s blanket, I started screaming for my fiance. He came in, grabbed the blanket, and dragged it down the hall, telling me as he went to get a jar. We got it in a jar and he asked if I’d been bit and what happened. I said “No I don’t think so” and then glanced at my left shoulder where I had first felt it crawling on me. I had what I thought looked like a rather ordinary looking spider bite. He knew what it was and packed the whole family in the car to go to the ER with our spider in the jar. Really strange to me still that I never felt it bite me.

As another poster pointed out, taking the speciman with you, if possible, is the best thing you can do, though I have to say while I was terrified and waiting for the doctor to come tell me I wasn’t going to die, every nurse in the ER barged in to my room to look at it, and me, in awe, which was a little unnerving and annoying; I just wanted to know if I was going to be okay..

At first I felt nothing but pins and needles in my shoulder and in my left arm. It started in the joints and then the whole arm started to feel dull and heavy and numb, like I’d slept on it. Then the muscle spasms, which actually weren’t bad at first, but became excruciating in the following hours and days. Dizziness, headache, body ache, muscle spasms and constant, unremitting nausea. The doc gave me Lorazapam for nausea and stomach cramps and oxycodone for pain, I gave up on the Lorazapam after the first dose- a med for nausea which has a side effect of….nausea? I’ve taken the pain killers cautiously, but when I don’t I feel like I have the worst case of anemia and/or flu plus horrible, horrible muscle spasms. Sometimes I get feverish, and I am hungry, but every time I eat I regret it. The cramping in the back of my legs and thighs is the worst.

Yesterday, Thursday, I finally felt pretty normal. Today I feel like a total rag doll and finally (after midnight) have taken some pain medication. I want it to go away, and have been trying to figure out how long it’s going to last. It seems like every person has a different reaction, so I don’t really know what to expect. God forbid this lasts for months as I’ve read here and there. I didn’t even get a big dose of poison, if the site of the bite is any indication.

The spider that bit me (I sitll have the dead spider in the jar) is the classic inky black spider with the red hourglass on it’s belly- but I’ve read that this species is a Southern black widow, and I live in Eastern Washington. I’m curious about that.
The one thing that I am endlessly grateful for, is that I got bitten and not my daughter. If it had appeared (out of nowhere, as it seemed to!) just a few minutes later, I would have not been in the room, and she could have brushed at it in her half-sleep state and been bitten, and I would have never known. It could have been fatal for her. The idea scares the hell out of me. Tonight is the first night I’ve let her sleep in there since it happened. I’ve swept out the ceiling, cleaned the room from top to bottom, and I’m still terrified that there’s another one in there.

The whole thing has been very traumatic. One of the worst effects is that I am now very afraid of bugs and spiders, and I never ever have been in my life. I was always the tomboy growing up that had no problem handling them- my 10 year old son is terrified of spiders and I always go into his room when he starts screaming to laugh and remove them. No more. I’m totally freaked out. Tonight I bought a bunch of spinach (since I felt so weak, I thought maybe I should have some greens- didn’t help- it’s the neurotoxin). I took the spinach home and cleaned it, and cleaned it and cleaned it like I have OCD or something. For some reason I was terrified it had some kind of bug in it and that I was going to bite into it. I made a huge salad out of it but couldn’t eat it all because every time I took a bite I cringed and braced myself for a bug. One night (I think Tuesday) I got the creepy-crawlies really bad- but I thought it might be a side effect of the pain killers and not just me.

All in all, not a good experience, and I wish I knew when the neurotoxin will work it’s way out of my system so I can go about my business like a normal person!!!