Today John and I sweated across the sunbaked sands of Seabranch State Park north of Hobe Sound, to see if the Red Widow spiders survive prescribed burn(s).   This initiative dates back a few years to John discovering the spiders there, and learning to love them.    I’m the tagalong, authorized to put them in the blog (again).   John took all of the spider pictures, except for the one with the false eyes. 

A thorough search of the area where we knew the spiders well years ago, all gone!   Frustration! Sorrow!  Then, returning to the cars basically giving up, and roasting in the heat, tried a Hail Mary by taking a quick peep at a different portion of the park.  There they were!  Is the whereabouts of the Red Widow determined by fire history?  Their population levels vary dramatically from year to year.

The Red Widow is not an everyday spider…it is big, colorful, rare, and weird.  Yes it is related closely to the Black Widow.  And yes its bite is venomous, well, the female’s bite. It is tough, however, to comprehend how a human would ever run afoul of these retiring creatures in their extreme habitat.  The Red Widow lives exclusively in central and southern Florida sand pine scrub, where entomologist James Carrel found its habitat constraints to be enforced by a narrow diet of scrub-dwelling scarab beetles.

The spiders weave funnel-shaped nests in in the tunnels formed by curled Saw Palmetto leaves, and lurks down in its shaded lurkim waiting for prey.  The base of the web, densely woven, lines the leafy tunnel and is the spider’s refuge.  The rest of the web extends loose, sloppy, and cobwebby up out of the tunnel attached among the tips of the saw palmetto leaves like a cat’s cradle on your spread-out fingers.  Beetles attempting to fly past snag in the upper web, and you know the rest.  The upper web captures wind-blown pine needles, a visual aid when seeking the spiders. The spider is most active at night.

In the lair the spots on the abdomen almost seem to glow, and they resemble the eyes of some larger scary creature.  Maybe the false eyes deter hungry birds.

The Latin name for the genus of widow spiders, Latrodectus, means “secret-biter”, referring to the bite being painless, at first.   The species name bishopi honors Marshall Bishop, a naturalist who had a reptile museum in Miami. Bishop made collections and observations critical to naming the species.

Bishop noticed a physical association between the Red Widow’s nest and an unidentified small paper wasp* prone to building tiny nests on Saw Palmetto.  Presumably the spider uses the wasps as body guards, remaining near them while hiding in its tubular tunnel. 

As far as I can tell using Google Scholar, nobody seems to have ever looked into this association beyond Mr. Bishop’s initial report, or determined whether the wasps and spiders have an ecological relationship or merely co-occupy a similar niche.  At first glance the spider-wasp seems plausible:  while viewing Red Widows today we saw multiple small paper wasp nests hidden in recesses on Saw Palmetto leaves, and commented on the prospect of stirring up angry wasps.   Our “sampling” was not adequate to be sure if the wasp nests and spider nests were truly associated.  Gathering data to show that convincingly will be quite an endeavor.

*Prime suspect. The paper wasp Mischocyttarus mexicanus nests almost entirely on Saw Palmetto.