But it wasn’t this year’s upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movie — it was a real goddam highly venomous spider on the outside of my garbage pail just now. (The signature red hourglass marking would be on its underside.) I would have loved to find Scarlett Johansson clinging to the side of my garbage pails, but generally my luck doesn’t work like that.
My neighbor found it and pointed it out to me, and my Internet search indeed seems to confirm that it is of the Southern Black Widow Spider (Latrodectus mactans) species. I also learned two fun facts: 1) “black widows” are actually several species of spiders that are also called “true widows,” which I find vaguely poetic, and 2) these are the most venomous spiders in North America. The female’s bite is approximately 15 times more potent than than a rattlesnake bite. Okay … that second fact is probably more terrifying than it is “fun.”
My neighbor also started telling me other black widow facts, like how if you find one, you can expect to find more because of … mating season or something, but I literally walked away as fast as I could, because that’s the kind of fatally depressing news I expect from the national news.
Anyway, my best friend got a new pet just yesterday, and she keeps showing off her hamster pics — so maybe this is my way of keeping up with the Joneses.
