haylesbury on the black widow spider! (Spiders in General)

Member Name: haylesbury

Product:	Spiders in General
Date:	30/10/06 (1586 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: beautiful and facinating animal providing you never have a lose one near you!

Disadvantages: It kills!

During the time I spent at college studying a variety of animals I decided to research the Black Widow spider. Probably one of the most feared spiders there are. Well. I learnt a lot about them and squashed a few legends about them in the process! They really are quite beautiful I think, although I am rather strange in that aspect and seem to love all creatures great and small! Saying that.. I certainly would not like to be shut in a room with one of these animals. Right, heres my info and if you have any more information to share with me or questions to ask then please e-mail me! Sh02020998@hotmail.co.uk. Thank you! And please keep checking out my reviews even if you don't like animals there are interesting things to learn believe me!

Black Widow Welfare

The black widow is a carnivore and is known for its ravenous ways. They eat insects, birds, spiders and other widows as well as numerous other things which they can get hold of. It is important that the black widows environment suits the needs of the widow as well as insuring that students and researchers can gain visibility to the spider when looking at it.

The enclosure size will ideally be around 1m by 1m and a further 1m high. This should be reinforced glass which should be fully secure and protected to prevent anyone breaking in and gaining access to the spider which could kill the human and cause huge problems if it escaped. It is important that the enclosure is not too large as the students or researchers need to be able to gain visibility to the spider to study it. The most ideal enclosure design will be built into a wall so that ventilation can be provided safely.

It IS important that the black widow has a high level of humidity within its environment. This should be done by soaking either spaglum moss or a potted plant which is moist and putting these into the enclosure. The enclosure should also be sprayed daily to continue to keep the moisture levels high. Ideally the enclosure should have no openings at the front and this should be built in glass and there will be a hiding place with a shutter door with CCTV in it and a higher temperature which can be shut when the spider is in it so that cleaning can take place. Food can be placed in through a small hatch in the wall providing you know where the spider is. As the additional section will have CCTV this suits the students and researchers needs as they can watch the black widow when it is out of its larger environment and has less enrichment. A small amount of water should be placed in a small bowl in the enclosure also.

The enclosure should provide the black widow with the natural things it would have in the wild. This includes debris such as leaves, hides, branches, twigs, logs, grass and sand. This allows the black widow to express natural behaviour which the students can monitor. Students should also be able to remover certain things from the environment and watch the reactions to this for experimentation and further research if needed although there must always be enough enrichment that the spider is not greatly affected by the removal of anything.

In the public perspective of seeing this animal at a zoo the enrichment would be very minimal so that the public get to see as much as possible. This can sometimes make the quality of life for the black widow or any other spider lower than it would be in a different form of captivity.

It is very important that the enclosure should be cleaned regularly and water changed daily. This allows the black widow to have a good quality of life as well as promoting good management and animal care to students and allowing research to be undertaken in a clean environment.

The black widow must be provided with full medical treatment an be protected against both internal and external parasites as well as against disease to ensure the welfare of the spider itself. If this is not done then the black widow can become ill and the illness may be transmitted to humans through cleaning even when the spider is not present.

Black Widow Behaviour

The black widow is one of the least sociable arachnids there is and they should not be homed together. If you are stupid enough to home two black widows together then it is completely normal for one of them to eat the other one and this should not be considered as abnormal behaviour at all. The black widow should happily eat anything which comes into its web and so when its live food is put in the black widow should normally be seen to kill and eat this.

The black widow naturally spends around 50% of its time creating spiders web and catching prey and the rest of the time sleeping where in captivity the spider can spend around 90% of its time sleeping. This is not normal behaviour for a black widow as they are naturally active, but this is natural for a black widow in captivity and is hard to prevent.

The black widow is not made to live in captivity and does not cope with it well. Often the lack of freedom and space to create webs to catch more prey can result in the black widow seeming very lethargic and showing signs of stress or depression by hiding away and sleeping continually and not being active when awake.

The black widow is naturally very shy and will not attack a human un-provoked. This is unlike their demonic reputations which seems to instigate that the black widow is an evil animal and will attack anything for no reason and hunt things out to kill.

In captivity it is common to see a black widow which dies unexpectedly. This can be a result of the situation within captivity and the lack of energy and stimulation. It is believed that they can literally be bored to death from being in captivity when they have so much in the wild. Sudden deaths have not been seen in the wild and deaths which have been noted have happened for a reason in the wild, where in captivity it can just be a result of the lack of freedom.

Lack of or excessive web spinning can occur in the black widow and this is again a lack of stimulus. Different spiders, just like different people react to boredom or the lack of stimulus (from environmental enrichment) in different ways. Some will give up, become very low and sleep, whilst others will keep occupied and do things which don’t seem to make a lot of sense, but they are just trying to do something rather than nothing.

Behavioural enrichment should be put into the environment. Ideally a large space should be given, the larger the better if possible so that the spider can practice its natural behaviour within captivity. This is not always practical, but I looked at the idea of a research or educational animal collection as opposed to a commercial one, so CCTV should be able to capture the majority of studies needed.

Enrichment such as branches, levels, plants, water pots, sand should all give the spider extra simulation and areas to create webs in. The food which is given should all be live to give the black widow the enrichment of being able to catch and kill the prey.

Feeding black widow

The black widow eats an entirely carnivorous diet and in the wild will eat things suck as birds, reptiles, small mammals, insects, some amphibians and they will eat quite a lot during a week if they are able to, though they can also go for long periods of time eating nothing at all.

The web which the black widow creates is spun to cover a large area and try to surround the black widow so that it is able to get the food from any area in the web which it is caught in. The male creates a web which is similar although it is not made as well and is smaller than the females web. The spider will, like other spiders stay on the web waiting for food to come to it with the feet on the strands of the web. This allows the spider to feel the movement when it passes through the web and find the area which has caught the prey in. The black widow will then bind the prey and form a cocoon around it using sticky silk strands.

The black widow has venom in its body which is lethal to any animal and it will use its forceps to inject this into the animals body which causes the animal to become paralyzed and the internal organs to slowly deteriorate until they have become incapable of any function and have broken down to form a liquid. The black widow will then puncture the body of its prey and suck the liquid from the body and then create a hole in the web around the animal so that it falls from the web.

It is not ethical in captivity to put live birds into an enclosure with an animal which would kill them so the black widow is unable to have any mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians put into the enclosure, so will have to live on a variety of insects. Insects such as crickets, locusts, hoverflies and other large flying insects which are not considered precious can be used as food for the black widow.

The black widow should be fed at the same time every day as it can take a variable amount of time for the insect in question to fly into the net to become the food for the black widow. For this reason the black widow is usually fed in the mid afternoon to evening and then will eat whatever flies to the web in turn.

This is not a balanced diet for the black widow and although the black widow is being provided with food which is variable as there are different insects which it can receive, this does not compare at all the black widows natural diet where it is able to catch birds, flying lizards commonly, as well as rodents and amphibians in low webs. Insects do not seem substantial to me to offer this nutrition. This could be the reason for some of the lethargy commonly shown by the black widow in captivity as the diet is not enough to fulfil its needs.

Black Widow Breeding

The male black widow is sexually mature at between 2 and 5 months of age, which sounds early, but the majority of spiders only live for a year, so this is normal. The female black widow comes sexually active at between 3 and 8 months of age, slightly later than the male.

When the spiders become sexually active both in the wild and in captivity depends on the food, environment, temperature and enrichment which the spider has to hep its body mature properly. The female black widow comes into season at any time once she is sexually active and when the environment is suitable for her to mother. As with many animals she will not come into season if the environment is unsuitable or if she is under nourished.

The temperature is usually raised to bring a black widow female into season as they tend to come into it in hotter weather. The female can sometimes live up to two years in captivity and will be available for breeding around 2 or 3 times during this time if conditions are suitable. In the wild the black widow will breed only once as they do not live for longer than a year in the wild as they are under more threats and changeable weather etc.

Once the male is sexually mature in the wild he leaves his location and goes in search or a female. This can be noted in captivity a s the black widow will spend months creating an intricate wed design and suddenly abandon it and loose interest in spinning. When the male is coming into contact with a female or has seen her web he vibrates his rear end on the females web which lets the female know he is there.

The male remains cautious during this and will run from the female often if he feels there is any chance she may attack him, when assured she is in season and will not attack he will move onto her web towards her. The male will then create a thin layer of silk around the female as used when catching prey and mate with her. The male leaves the sperm on the females body and the female will use this for numerous batches of eggs over a number of months!

The male will run away quickly after mating as the female can become aggressive and as the most known fact goes about the black widow, the black widow, on occasion has been known to eat the male after mating. This happens more often in captivity, because the male can not get away and the female feels threatened and will attack him like any other prey which is in her net. This is why breeding programmes are not usually successful for the black widow in captivity and rarely are tried for.

After the mating has occurred the female creates a silk cocoon and lays her eggs into this cocoon. She will then fertilize the eggs with the sperm left by the male and begin the creation of an egg sac from the silk around the fertilized eggs to keep them warm. The egg sac will then be placed into the web of the black widow so she knows where it is and can detect if there is an intrusion or anything happening with the eggs.

The female will have around 150-500 eggs in every sac and creates between 5 and 20 between May and October in the wild, or the suitable environment and temperature times in captivity. The eggs will remain in the sac for between 10 and 30 days when they will hatch.

Once the young have hatched they are very small and have been reported to be opaque. The mother and father do not have any impact on the young and they feed for themselves immediately and kill small prey.

Summary: They really are facinating, just because things are scary doesn't make them less interesting!!