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Comments & ID Thoughts
Roommate found it in the bathroom while I was out. She called it a brown widow, but the picture she took doesn't really look like pictures I found of L. geometricus, so I think that's just what she calls this spider. She killed it before I got home, so I just have the picture to go off of.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Jan 17, 2020
- Photographed: Jan 17, 2020
- Spider: Unidentified
- Location: Ithaca, New York, United States
- Spotted Indoors: Sink or bathtub
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes:
This was a Steatoda triangulosa, absolutely not a Brown Widow. It is one of the spiders called False Widows. They are in the same family, Theridiidae, as Brown Widows, but False Widows aren’t medically dangerous.
Thanks! I’d read that there aren’t really any widow spiders in New York, so I was super confused when she called it one.
I’m glad you asked for an ID. No, Brown Widows don’t live in New York. An individual of any spider species could show with the help of transportation, but no Brown Widows naturally reside in NY. Bugguide.net has only one Black Widow sighting for NY. There are a couple of Black Widow species that live in the Northeast, but almost none are seen. It is common for people to assume something they aren’t familiar with is the worst thing they’ve heard of. Water snakes in the Northeast get labeled as venomous “water moccasins” and killed. Brown spiders tend to get… Read more »
Maybe it’s something similar to why birds avoid eating Viceroy butterflies, because they look similar to poisonous Monarchs. Only with humans, we realized we’re big enough to kill stuff that looks like it might be dangerous, even if it’s actually harmless. I usually try to leave spiders alone, but if it’s one I don’t recognize, I try to look up what it might be. The one problem is, looking at too many spider pictures triggers a really visceral reaction for some reason, so I was really happy when I realized I could just submit a picture and let someone with… Read more »
That makes a lot of sense, it is safer to assume the worst. I do the ‘leave it alone if I don’t know it’ thing too, including insects and plants. Arachnophobia is a combination of a genetic trait toward phobias and learned behavior, I was fortunate to inherit neither from my parents. This is a great website for people who are on the verge of being ready to fight arachnophobia. Some anxiety will remain, but you can control your reaction to it. My husband is fighting it, he goes out of his way to take spider photos for me and… Read more »