Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The brown widow.

I lived in a large town home in Los Angeles and in front was a stairway leading to the entrance of the building.  The handrail for the stairway was flanked on the outside by a bit of grass and some bushes and trees.  One night when I rode up on my bike, arriving home from work, my headlight shone right onto a large spider that had built a web from the bush, over the handrail and out onto the bottom step.  Not only was the spider large, but it was sliver chrome shiny.  I had to inspect a little closer and as I looked nearer I saw the long legs were a khaki color alternating with dramatic dark brown joints.  All of this was topped off by an orange hourglass on the silver chrome abdomen.  Wowza, what a spider.  

I tripped out for a second and then ran inside to get my roommate Nick and be like, "Dude, you've got to check out this spider!"  Nick followed me outside where I used my bike headlight to show him where this giant majesty was and he was like, "Woah".  We decided to look up what kind of spider it could be and entered some of the descriptive features as search words on the trusty internet.  The spider that quickly came up under the description we gave was the brown widow.  What?  There's a brown widow?  Everyone knows about the black widow, but now brown too?  Oh and the information we read said she was more venomous than the black widow.  Fantastic.  There was a healthy and huge highly venomous spider right outside on the steps of the house.  Sure she only came out at night, but that's when no one would see her and someone's dog could get too close or something else.  She was far from any entrance to the place, but she was still there.

Nick and I contemplated catching her and keeping her in a jar feeding her the odd insect here and there, but ultimately that idea was deemed too crazy.  That huge brown widow had survived just fine on her own up that point without our interference, and there was never any problems with the spider reported besides.  It was best to leave her there to come and go from day to night, hiding in the safety of the bush by day and coming out to her web on the steps at night to hunt.  I saw her on and off the rest of the time I lived there, but she disappeared after a while, likely moving on to a safer place for her and everybody, not including the insects.   

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