Public Service Announcement- Papa.

Papa here.

Some of you may be planning a trip to the beautiful, sweltering Southeast in the future. You may be reading this blog right now, clicking back and forth between tabs, planning a little getaway to Macon, or Birmingham, or maybe even little old Clemson, SC. It's because this may be the case that I provide the following announcement, complete with photographs taken from a recent evening on the back porch.

See, the thing is, the Southeast has a lot of...

BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS
BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS
BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS

You're probably thinking, "Whatevs. Deal with it." Well, let me tell you. We found this little bad boy (actually, bad girl, since they get their "widow" handle from their habit of eating their male counterpart, mantis-style, after they get the "goods," so to speak) in the kids' sandbox. Henry found it; luckily, the child has yet to find a caution he'd like to throw to the wind. Score one for a genetic predisposition to temper curiosity with a healthy mix of caution, safety-firstness, and unadulterated fear.


Actually, these are photos of the second one we found, about three minutes after we found the one in the sandbox. This one was in Becky's garden--which is good, since these days that's about the last place she'd be doing the kind of gardening-type activities that might lead to a spider bite (zing!).

Of course, the Southeast is awash in these suckers, and you never really hear about any kids dying from spider bites. All my colleagues seem to have seen one at some point--Jamie had one in his mailbox, precisely the kind of place you might find yourself placing your hands into a dark, hole-like place. The Hallers apparently offer generous subsidies and free cable to any Widow wanting to take up underneath their house. So maybe I'm just blowing this all out of proportion.

Still, though. These things are exotic--and if I know anything from watching the news these days, it's that exotic things are dangerous.

Woah--I forgot to mention. There is a much less-dangerous, but much more threatening-looking spider called a Wolf Spider. These things are everywhere, and they're pretty scary until you realize they can't make webs, so the only reason they're so big and fast is that they actually have to chase their prey down themselves, the old-fashioned way. They're actually totally harmless. But--oh, but. See, they don't have webs (I mentioned this), so they have to improvise on the whole reproductive front. When it comes time to lay eggs, they just secrete one giant egg and carry it around, attached to their rear, until it hatches. I prefer this method to that of other spiders, who leave their eggs in literally every nook and cranny in my garage.

In any case, when the babies arrive, guess what Mama Wolf Spider does with them? How about this?!?



And this is precisely the horror show that I confronted a couple weeks ago in the garage. As you can imagine, feelings of wonder and respect for the ingenious varieties of nature gradually gave way to a desire to destroy such a blight on the natural order, and I am happy to report that a surgically placed strike can turn such a sight into a cool little spider explosion with spiderlings as the blast fallout.

Phew! Glad I got that all out! I'm thinking of doing this more often--so send in requests!