How dangerous are black widow spiders?

They can definitely kill you with a single bite if you’re a child, but if you’re an adult it rarely kills as long as you seek medical attention.

to dangerous

Only the bite of the female black widow, usually the adult female, is potentially dangerous. Although extremely painful and temporarily debilitating, fatalities from untreated widow bites are uncommon. During the period between 1926 to 1943, mortality ranged from 4 percent to 5 percent, but current medical treatments have reduced this to a much smaller incidence. Death usually results from respiratory paralysis. The very old, very young, and those with a history of high blood pressure (hypertensive) are at greatest risk. Prompt medical treatment can greatly reduce the danger from widow bites and has reduced fatalities to extremely low rates in recent years. Source

First aid for someone who has been bitten by a brown recluse spider includes use of an ice pack to prevent or to reduce the swelling in the area where the bite occurred. Cooling the area helps to lessen tissue damage. Also, sanitizing the area with hydrogen peroxide or alcohol helps to prevent infection. Promptly seek medical attention. If the spider can be found, it should be collected and taken with the patient to the doctor to confirm the identity of the spider involved. The bite of a brown recluse is certainly a serious condition and hospitalization of the victim may be required. Those in poor general physical condition, young children, and older people are more apt to be affected seriously by the bite of the brown recluse. Source

Too pathfinder. I really delighted am to hear your a square again.

LOL^

They’re very dangerous. Their bite can eat your skin, & like MrGeneVan said, they CAN kill you. If it were me, I’d not take the chance. They’d be deader than dead.

I’ve known a few black widows in my day.

@SeventhSense 2 legged ones, huh?

Yes and sometimes leave me with their toxic poison coursing through my veins for years.

I don’t know, is death dangerous?

@SeventhSense You’re just hanging with the wrong crowd!

technically, @syz, is correct concerning Black widow spiders. As for the Brown Recluse, you cannot tell that it is a Brown Recluse simply by visual inspection. The saying about there being a violin shape on it is erroneous. Many spiders have that shape, and a spider’s physical appearance varies even among members of the same family and species. According to the experts, 80% of Brown Recluse bites do NOT need medical attention. For more information, go here

Of the 50,000 known species of spiders in the world, only about 4 are considered dangerous in North America, and NONE of them are deadly, unless you are a child, elderly, or have high blood pressure, or other debilitating medical condition.

Spiders are more beneficial than other bugs. Spiders eat mosquitoes, and those insects cause many more deaths each year. Spiders aren’t as much of a threat as some people would have you believe.

SQUISH!

Just like you wouldn’t play with a rattlesnake, don’t hesitate to not tempt fate and remove this potential danger if you can.

@evelyns_pet_zebra Ahhhhhh, brown recluse was what I was thinking of. Well, black widows are no good either.

@jbfletcherfan
Maybe in the past…but I’ve learned.

@SeventhSense Good. Keep your guard up. :-)

Well like Snoop says:“If the ride is more fly, then you must buy.”

@avvooooooo killing spiders and snakes simply out of fear is ignorant. Those who play with things they do not understand deserve what they get, but those that respect the dangerous creatures know better than to kill something simply because they feel threatened by it. Once you learn to respect the potential of venomous creatures, and understand them, you should be smart enough to leave them alone. Killing them is doing more harm than good, usually. Rattlesnakes eat mice and rats that infect and destroy grain crops. Any smart person knows that rattlesnakes do more good than harm. Usually the people who get bit by rattlesnakes are behaving in a stupid manner. It isn’t like rattlesnakes seek out people just to bite them.

@evelyns_pet_zebra Black widows are dangerous. If you see them out and about in the wild, leave them be. If they’re in your space, then they’re taking their lives into their… legs. Its that simple.

As I said, you wouldn’t play with a rattlesnake because that’s unnecessarily courting danger. But if one is looking at your pets or is hanging out in a place where someone might stumble over it, you take care of it.

I’m not afraid of either of these things. I’ve lived in the country for the vast majority of my life and have encountered both. If creatures in the wild stay in the wild (we have a vast stretch of fields and land that hasn’t been “encroached on” all around), there’s not a problem. When they’re in the yard, in the house, or hanging out on the handle of a car like the last black widow I encountered (accidentally squished that one, if I hadn’t I would have gotten bitten), they have to be removed. I don’t kill just any spider, just any snake that I encounter. But when its a venomous one in a position to threaten me or the dogs (in the large, fenced yard), that’s a different story.

That’s far from being ignorant.

@avvooooooo cars are dangerous, your dogs are dangerous, a lamp can be dangerous. There are several species of Black Widows, and not all of them are shiny black with a red hourglass on their belly. The male Black Widow has very weak venom, and probably wouldn’t bite you if it could.

My Dad taught me about snakes. He raised rattlers in his garage when he was a young man. Simply because he found them to be fascinating creatures. He taught me to respect all animals, not just the cute ones.

I have never seen a black widow or a brown recluse in my area, even though where I live is in the northern reaches of their range. I have lived in rural as well as city surroundings, and the number of people who claim every brown spider they see is a Brown Recluse and every black shiny spider they see is a Black Widow numbers in the thousands. Doesn’t prove a thing. Usually only an expert can tell if a spider is a Brown Recluse or simply just a brown spider. Has to do with the pattern of their eyes and the microscopic makeup of their sexual organs. I know how to tell a wolf spider from an ordinary brown wood spider, and jumping spiders are easy.

I’ve seenmy fair share of poisonous snakes, like cotton mouths, copperheads, etc, and I never felt the need to kill them. It’s better to simply avoid them, and if you have to, gently coerce them to leave. Snakes go where the food is, if you eliminate the things they eat, they are unlikely to stick around. The yellow banded water snake is pretty darn aggressive, and a lot of people kill them because they think they are venomous. But they are harmless. I’ve been bitten by them several times.(I used to keep them as pets). Hurts like hell, but there is no venom to worry about.

I am more likely to kill a rabbit or a squirrel over a snake, since those are basically rodents and much more destructive than a snake is. rabbits aren’t technically rodents, but they might as well be, the dirty little flea bitten things.

But hey, you kill all the snakes you want. I for one haven’t killed a snake in thirty years. The last one I did kill was an accident, I ran over it with my truck.

@evelyns_pet_zebra I know a black widow when I see one. I also know the difference between corn snakes and king snakes and other varieties that are actually dangerous. Part of living where I do is knowing what you’re seeing when you see it. You insist I’m ignorant. I’m not.

I had a weird day. Closed the back of my mom’s van (like this one), realized I forgot to put something in there, opened it back up again and discovered that I had squished one of these with the door. There were a lot of webs and stuff when I started looking around, so when I got home I took the water hose to the back of the van, mostly the handle to open one of the doors near the license plate. When I did that, things that looked like these came out. Not entirely sure if that was a brown widow, since that’s something that I’m not as familiar with and since it fell on my foot I shook it off and stepped on it when I was doing the yucky dance, but those sure do look like the egg cases that I found. Which doesn’t entirely confirm my identification, but does help. So… it was weird venomous spider day for me.

Let’s just say i wouldn’t risk getting bitten by one. If they’re in my yard or my house they’re taken care of because i don’t want me or my pets getting bitten. I’d rather be safe than sorry in this instance.