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Letter to the editor

Spider scare washed away

By JON WILSON
Published June 24, 2007

Crews used pressurized water to hose away bus stop spiders last week after a rider reported seeing black widows - the ebony arachnids that carry a highly toxic bite.

Maybe they were black widows and maybe they weren't.

Officials from the county bus agency said the spiders actually were brown, rather than the shiny black that characterizes the black widow, which also carries a distinctive red hourglass marking on its belly.

They could have been brown widows, the black widow's highly toxic cousin. Or they might have been simple brown spiders.

Riders spied the spiders at two Fourth Street N shelters, one at 94th Avenue and another at 96th Avenue, said Bob Lasher, spokesman for the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority.

"However, our director of maintenance says they were brown spiders of some sort, not black widows. He did say that his crew deals with insect pests all of the time, " Lasher wrote in an e-mail.

Crews do see black widows occasionally when changing or installing shelters because the spider likes the rectangular, hollow tubing used in shelter construction.

"The good news for riders is that insects that gravitate toward the interior of the tubing are shielded from the public and outside environs, and vice versa, " Lasher wrote.

John Davies is operations manager of Spectrum MultiService, which contracts with the bus agency to get rid of insects.

"Of 525 shelters we service, I can't remember more than a half dozen where there's been that kind of a problem with spiders, " he said. Wasps cause the most problems.

If the spiders were black widows, it wouldn't be unusual for them to appear in corners of bus stop shelters, said Bob Albanese, a Pinellas County extension service horticulturist.

They like living around edges: in sliding glass door grooves for example, or close to the ground where a house's siding and slab overlap.

"They're a native spider and they're not uncommon, " Albanese said.

They tend to show up during dry spells, he said, and they also tend to stay in their webs.

"They aren't going to come out and hunt you down, " Albanese said.

In 2006, there were 160 black or brown widow bites in the state, according to the Florida Poison Information Center's branch at Tampa General Hospital. None was fatal and nearly all resulted in minor or moderate aftereffects, said Dr. Cynthia Lewis-Younger, the center's managing director.

Effects can include pain, nausea and vomiting, she said.

The classic advice holds true in relation to widow spiders - be careful where you put your fingers.

But if bitten, the best thing to do is go to an emergency room, Lewis-Younger said. First aid could include a cold compress (not ice) placed on the bite.

[Last modified June 24, 2007, 00:03:07]