When Lauren Schmidtke found an interesting spider in her sister’s house on Airdrie, she was not sure what exactly was, until she glanced at a photo.
“I acted and, indeed, there was a perfect sand watch,” he said, referring to one of the most identifiers of a female black widow.
“Honestly, I didn’t realize,” said Schmidtke. “I know how dangerous they are.”
Olds College Ken Fry entomology instructor identified the spider in the photos as a Western Black WidowThe only spider in Alberta with poison powerful enough to damage a human.
The small spiders, who fries like the size of a chickpea, are naturally further south in the driest habitats of Alberta, around places like Lethbridge and Medicine Hat.
Fortunately for Aracnobes in the Calgary area, spider sightings are “extremely rare” anywhere near the city, Fry said.
“It is simply not its native range,” he said. “They are extremely restricted to the south of Alberta.”
Any sighting around Calgary “would be the result that the equipment or material is transported from the southern parts of the province,” he said.
Fry said that black widows reported in Calgary are often erroneous identifications of similar -looking spiders such as the Boreal Combfoot. Spiders who are most commonly in Alberta do not have the poison strong enough to harm humans.
“The black widow is the only one that has a poison that has a neurotoxic effect,” Fry said.
The poison of the western black widow is extremely powerful: it contains a neurotoxin called ALFA-Latinxinwhich is directed directly to the central nervous system of mammals and other vertebrates.
However terrifying it sounds, black widows bites are extremely rare. According to an article in the Medical Entomology MagazineThere were only five confirmed cases of black widows bites that required the use of antivenene in Canada, all of which occurred in British Columbia, from 2009 to 2015.
“It’s very, very rare,” Fry said. “You can get some nausea, sweat, stomach cramps, things like that.”
There are no registered cases of the poison of a black widow that kills anyone in Canada. Nor have there been confirmed deaths in the United States, although there They have been deaths caused by the brown inmate, another highly poisonous spider that lives in parts of the United States but is not naturally found in Canada.
Part of why it is unlikely that black widows send someone to the hospital is because they are “extremely shy spiders,” Fry said.
“They are not aggressive at all,” he said. “He who had in my laboratory, if he would feed her, she would get away immediately and hide in a corner as soon as something big came.”
He said that a black widow normally would bite a human if she seemed to do it.
“The possibility of biting you is extremely rare, unless you provoke it intentionally, or in the improbable case that you put your hand on your website and feel threatened.”
Fry said people worried about meeting black widows should take adequate precautions when reaching old boxes or underground spaces.
“It’s simple: just wear gloves if you’re going to investigate in dark spaces,” he said.
In the case of an sighting of black widows confirmed somewhere, the spider should not be, as in the Calgary area, Fry said that the best course of action would be to sacrifice it humanly.
