The spider man from the Natural History Museum came out to the house today to take samples of our brown widows. Unfortunately, I had killed an adult this morning before work, but luckily we had a big ol' egg sac with hundreds of babies to give him. He said he'd have to look at them under the microscope to make an absolute positive ID, but that based on the shape of the egg sacs, they were indeed brown widows. Our backyard is the furthest east in San Diego County that they've been discovered.
While Sherry was showing spider man one of the old abandoned brown widow webs, a black widow came out and surprised them. (Spider man said it wasn't unusual to turn over an outside bench or table and find a brown widow living in one corner and a black widow living in the other.) He carefully coaxed her into a jar to add to his samples. He later went on to say that when brown widows make their way into an area, black widows sometimes mysteriously disappear...
Sherry also got to talking to him about brown recluses because she thought she had seen one a few years back. Spider man said that, based on the number of brown recluse diagnoses being made in California, there should be at least 30 million of them creeping around. Yet not a single one has been found here since the 1960s. He then directed us to a web page written by an exasperated arachnologist at the University of California, Riverside titled "Myth of the Brown Recluse" which ends with all-capitalized red letters, "THERE ARE NO BROWN RECLUSE SPIDERS LIVING IN CALIFORNIA."
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