Black Widow

I hadn't realised that the black widow spider was so common in this part of Missouri. Gabe found one squashed flat after opening our garage door on his way to school last week. I was skeptical at first, but on closer examination, sure enough you can see the telltale red hourglass shape on the spiders abdomen. That's the first one I've seen outside of a museum. Sierra then goes on to tell me that there is a hole on the pool building in Jackson that houses black widows quite often that she knew of. Things like this make me curious.

More common here are the very venomous brown recluse, whose head and thorax form kind of a violin or fiddle shape. We had seen several of them in our shed this summer.