[b said:
Quote[/b] (jojo @ July 28 2006,12:11)]ozzy what happens with pregnant ones? and i want to hear about the terrifying experience....
Ok I'll tell you about this nightmare.
I posted half of the story before but I never posted the nightmare ending.
You can read the beginning
here.
Here's the ending.
Everything was going great. She was living in an aquarium, had a nice web. I fed her adult crickets. I could even hold her, but I'll hold black widows I find in the wild too.
I woke up one morning and I noticed an egg sac. I took it out and place it in a cup with a papertowel held by a rubberband over the top. One morning I woke up and I saw something hanging off the cup. After a closer inspection I saw it was a baby spider hanging on a web. I looked at the cup and the papertowel had split. There was hundreds of spiders inside the cup and a few outside of it. I took the cup and placed it outside. I hope a few of them survived. I almost had a disaster , but the good news is I caught it in time and I don't think any escaped into my room. Next time I wouldn't be so lucky.
A couple of days later, another eggsac. A couple of day after that another one. I decided to leave them in the tank. I had a fine screen top on in and I was sure that they couldn't fit through it. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them when they hatched. The tank was big enough that a couple of spiders could live in it. I decided to just wait and see if any of the babies would setup a home. I had planed to grab the extras and release them outside. I knew some of the babies would be eaten by the mother, but that's just nature I guess. But not long after the last eggsac was made, the mother died.
Well they hatched, and not long after that I saw there was a few on the outside of the take. Some had escaped, I'm still not sure how. So I just took the whole tank and placed it outside. I took the top off and let them all go. I wasn't sure how many had escaped into my room, but I knew it wasn't good. Remember, this was my bedroom.
For about two weeks I rounded up the babies and took them outside. They were everywhere. If you know about baby black widows, they spin a little web and they use it to fly on the wind to their new home. I have a fan in my room that circulates the air because I have a lot of tanks with reptiles in them. So they had plenty of wind to fly with. I would be sitting at my pc and I see something fly between the screen and my face. They would also land in my hair, and be dangling right in from of my face. This went on for about two weeks. I finally found where most of them were hiding. I had a nepenthes chamber set up under a table they were in the folds of the plastic. Hundreds of them. So I caught all of them and took them outside.
I saw a few after that but only a few. I'm pretty sure I got them all.
The scary part was not the baby spiders. They are not dangerous anyway. What I was scared of was that they would grow up and find hiding places in my room, like my shoes.
Well I learned my lesson. No pregnant black widows. One day when I have a better setup I'd like to get another one.