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Posted by ECO on March 29, 2003 at 22:45:30:
In Reply to: Re: Possible brown widow? posted by jerryfar on March 29, 2003 at 03:38:51:
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:I'm not sure what it is, but I do know it is a beautiful spider. I took a picture of it two days ago and it hasn't changed since (other than getting much bigger as I fed it a mealworm). Maybe this will help shed some light on what it is. If it is a brown widow, then I would say they've found a home in Arizona as well. If it is some kind of black widow-morph, it's different than you see normally, so she is beautiful to look at either way.
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::Brown widows are an introduced species in North America. They live worldwide in tropical regions, so it is quite possible that since they are now in the USA, they will spread to all the areas in the US that are warm enough to sustain them. Arizona, New mexico, Louisiana, California.. and all the other southern states with a warm climate will probably be seeing these eventually. But what you have is most certainly a widow spider, and it's either a brown widow, or a morph of black widow or juvenile coloration that I have never seen before. Widows do go through a variety of marking changes as they mature, gradually gaining more black overall, until they retain only the red hourglass, and perhaps a few dots on the back. However, the shape of the hourglass on your specimen is not typical of any of the native North American widow spiders, but is identical to the hourglass on the definite brown widow in this picture:
::http://www.petbugs.com/caresheets/L-geometricus.html
::So I would say that you do have a brown widow.
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