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Comment by softbuilder | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully the Black Widow is one of the dumbest spiders I've every encountered. Amazingly easy to kill if you can be calm about it. (I feel like I should be knocking on wood now.) I don't know how many varieties there are though, so YMMV.

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The only time I've definitively seen one was in my kitchen. I put it in a Tupperware and let it loose in the yard. It was so slow moving that I was never particularly concerned about being bit.

I had no idea the bite was that bad or I would have just finished it off instead.

Yeah these are one of the few spiders I kill on sight instead of gently moving to the yard.

Pretty much as soon as I find one I immediately drop whatever I'm doing to make sure it's out of my living space as quickly as possible before I lose track of it.

I lived for a few years in a particularly widow-prone area and had many black widows in the house and garage. I eventually realized that the daddy-long-legs variant in my house seemed to compete handily with them. So I stopped cleaning webs and found I had far fewer black widows. My house appeared rather shabby though. Tradeoffs.

For some reason, your comment made me imagine a hacker forum filled with black widow spiders talking about stuff, and one of them posts, "Thankfully the human is one of the dumbest animals I've ever encountered. Amazingly easy to kill if you can be calm about it."

If you knock on wood, make sure it's not a pile of chopped wood outside.

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