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Comment by hackitup7 | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related: Does anyone know the reason that both species have that frightening red hourglass / gang tattoo situation? Really adds to the general horror show of the situation.

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These are usually a "don't eat me, you'll regret it" signal to birds.

https://today.duke.edu/2016/02/blackwidows

Not just birds, they're a universal "fuck with me and you will regret it" indicator in nature.

Other examples include poisonous frogs, fish, etc.

Basically anything that has bright colors in flashy styling, you stay the hell away from.

Ah, that makes sense. I sympathize with the birds on this one.

I don't get the horror thing. If you live in North America, chances are they're all around you in woodpiles, rafters, wherever. You never see them because they run and hide.

I view them like perfectly engineered, self replicating, insect exterminators we might someday soon buy (with a cloud app): they work for you day and night keeping pests at bay and they do their darnedest to stay out of sight.

They are dangerous, though. I vividly remember my dad being intubated in the hospital when I was a young boy as the result of black widow bites. Got on the back of his neck in an attic and bit him several times when he felt something and tried to brush it off.

We shouldn’t be terrified of them, but a healthy respect is probably wise.

Like others are saying, there’s a huge risk of getting bit. I have a family member who was bit on the foot while cleaning his basement. He still walks with a limp 20 years later from the damage it did, and is lucky he didn’t lose his leg.

Other spiders get left alone around my house, but not widows.

Bingo. I personally hate spiders, I find them repugnant. But I love the idea of spiders and I hate flies and wasps orders of magnitude more. A spider will never go for my food while it's on my plate. That's why I never kill spiders. I often run into the little guys in my garage or outside my window and I always think it's because I was too fast and they didn't get a change to GTFO.

They tend to position themselves with the hourglass facing where birds would see it and be frightened away. The red is just for females. Male black widows are grayish brown with a bright yellow hourglass marking. Have not seen a male brown widow.

Same reason that bees and wasps have distinctive markings: it advertises to potential predators that they have defense mechanisms at their disposal.

Because having said defense mechanisms without waving your guns around like they do in the South is pretty useless.

You managed to bring politics into a conversation about ...spiders?

Sigh.

And by the way, I lived in Texas for 17 years and never once saw someone "wave a gun around", and only once saw someone carrying openly.

I grew up in the north east though, and guns were everywhere, I remember going to a movie with my wife, standing in line for tickets and a gun fell out of the jacket of the man in front of me, who appeared to be a gang member.

But please, let's just keep with the knee-jerk political comments. Maybe we can bring them into a discussion about daffodils or something next.

I'm not quite sure how a joke equates to politics, but you do you.

The brown widows in my garage have orange hourglasses -- are they a different gang?

>are they a different gang?

I can only speak for LA, but the red are Bloods, while the orange are Hoovers who are allied with Crips

they're in the same genus: as such, they essentially derive their DNA from a shared base class (so to speak), and perhaps they share the red tattoo dna.

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