The Misunderstood Western Black Widow Spider

I found this female and her egg sac about a week ago, nesting behind a large planter made out of wood and gutters. At the moment, this planter is filled with nasturtiums which died in our most recent heatwave, so I won’t be showing you the planter itself. I will say that I’ve tried many a flower (and berry) in these shallow gutters, and the nasturtiums fared the best yet; it’s hard to keep things wet enough here to stay happy. Anyway…. I was inspecting the dead flowers and trying to figure out what to plant next when I came across this beautiful Western Black Widow.

Now, I want to start out by acknowledging that if you do get bitten by a WBW, the bite will be quite painful and you’ll need emergency care. However, death is unlikely. WBWs are the most poisonous American spider and as such, they get a bad rap; but like many insects, they feel no need to sting humans, unless the humans happen to be messing around in their territory. Even then, unless the spider’s body is pinched repeatedly, it will not bite.

Despite knowing this, when I had little kids, I confess I killed many WBWs. They used to nest inside our wooden perimeter fence (they probably still do), and I was worried that a kid (either my own or a neighbor kid) would climb the fence and grab a spider inadvertently. That would have been bad. But I do feel terrible for killing them like I did back then. If I had little kids now, I would explain all about the spiders and get the kids aware of how and where they live, so that we could all live in peace together. Oh well. We all evolve.

In fact, WBWs are described by arachnologists as ‘shy.’ They tend to hide in dark places where they will go unnoticed. They spin a huge, strong, messy, complicated web (not pretty at all), which is very unique to its species. I see far more WBW webs than I do the actual spiders, and it’s the primary way I figure out where they are living. They catch a lot of flies in those webs (as well as other insects and arthropods). They bite their prey in several places, and suck out their insides, leaving the external shell in the web.

The females also put pheromones on their webs to attract males. The male then performs a sort of ‘courtship dance’ on the web to let the female know he’s a potential mate, rather than dinner. Female WBWs don’t always eat the males after mating, either - it just depends on how hungry she is, how fit the male is, and how fast he scurries away.

There are hundreds of baby spiderlings in that egg case you see in the photo. They will hatch inside the sac, and then emerge. Most of them get eaten right away by their siblings. Very few survive, and those eventually (like the spiderlings in Charlotte’s Web) spin a long silk that takes them flying through the air to another part of the garden.

It’s been interesting to watch how the mother spider behind my planter protects her egg sac. Since I water there regularly (the plants don’t need the water anymore, being DEAD, but the bees like to drink from the soil there - wasn’t that spider smart to build her web in such a place???), the spray naturally hits the sac sometimes. She doesn’t love that, and will often move the sac behind a crosspiece to protect it. But spiders aren’t really ‘good’ mothers. Not in the sense we think of, anyway.

I must confess that spiders are not my favorite thing. I really like insects in general, but it’s tough for me to like spiders, and I’m not sure why. The way I combat this is to learn all I can about them. Anytime I see a spider than I’ve never seen before, I take a picture and use iNaturalist to ID it. Then I read about it and learn all about the ecosystem services it provides. This usually helps me to get over my ‘shivery’ feelings about spiders. I will say this is a work in progress for me, and I may never really like spiders. But I appreciate them, and see that they are an integral part of biological processes. We need them. So - every time I walk by this WBW, I crouch down and say hi. I’m actually looking forward to seeing the eggs hatch, and hope I get the privilege to witness it.

EDITED 7/22/24: SHE’S FEASTING Check it out!

Evaporative Cooling

I don’t think there is anyone who hasn’t experienced an extreme heatwave this past month. Rin, who is spending the summer in Savannah, experienced their first East Coast heatwave (with accompanying high humidity) a couple of weeks ago. Here in the West, we too have had our share of extreme heat, though not the humid kind. Our backyard weather station hit 116 degrees several times this week, and I instantly start sweating the moment I walk outside.

I have discovered recently that I am a ‘sweater.’ I don’t mean that I’m always sweating; but yes, when the circumstances are right, I will sweat more than the average person. I learned this because Tom and I have joined a local gym. The reason for joining began with injury recovery, but quickly morphed into something else - another tool to build our resilience. We are planning a month-long walking trip next summer for our 25th anniversary, so we are both working hard to build muscle, improve balance, regain agility, and increase flexibility. We’ve added all kinds of different exercises to our daily routine; simply hiking up a hill is not going to prepare us for hiking 16 miles a day for weeks on end.

So now we are in training. And man, when I train, I sweat. I mean not just in the usual places. When I’m done with, say, a spin class, my calves are slicked with sweat. And after a TRX class, my forearms are dripping. I suppose it could be embarrassing, but I don’t look at it that way - I consider it a sign of a healthy vascular system that is performing one of the jobs it has uniquely evolved to do.

Sweat is a beautiful human adaptation. Chimpanzees and macaques have sweat glands, but humans have 10 times the amount that they do and are the sweatiest among the great apes. Scientists have discovered that “the higher density of sweat glands in humans is due, to a great extent, to accumulated changes in a regulatory region of DNA that drives the expression of a sweat-gland-building gene.” This happened through repeated mutations and contributed to an evolution of higher sweat gland density in humans. We are meant to sweat! It’s our primary way of cooling ourselves. As the water in sweat evaporates, the surface of our skin cools. This is true of any evaporative cooling. A liquid will remove latent heat from a surface, and that evaporating liquid will cool the air around it.

Since most animals do not sweat, they have to cool themselves in other ways, and sometimes they too use evaporative cooling. During this heat wave, we’ve been closely watching the behavior of our backyard bees on our water fountain.

Bees use water to cool their hive. Some worker bees are tasked with finding, collecting, and bringing water back; it is spread in a thin surface over the surface of the comb and the bees then fan their wings to evaporate it. A hive may use a quart of water a day in the hot months for this purpose.

Honeybees are not the only ones who do this. Some wasp colonies (many wasps are social insects and, like honeybees, live in large groups) use water the same way. They collect it and spread it on the surface of their nests. Today, while filling the one of the water bowls at the school garden, I watched both paper wasps and yellow jackets collecting water from the edges.

This is one of the most important ways we can help insects; we can place shallow bowls of water around our gardens and yards. Put a rock in the bowl, or several rocks, so that the insects don’t drown (they have poor depth perception). If mosquitos are a worry, change the water daily or weekly (it’s good to do this anyway to keep the water clean). Birds will love this, too.

Many insects will also get water from the soil in your garden, so it’s nice to have a bare space which you keep wet for this purpose. Butterflies especially adore a muddy spot.

Another creature in our garden that appreciates evaporative cooling is the chickens. Chickens, like dogs, pant when it’s hot, and this past week they’ve been panting from dawn until full dark. I actually spray them with water, and though they seem to dislike me doing that, they really love when the ground in their run is wet. So when the temperature is over 100, I go out several times a day and spray them, and the dirt in the run, thoroughly. Immediately afterward, the chickens will congregate in the wet place, and they really perk up.

Chickens also dig holes in the dirt to find the cooler place under the surface. Many creatures do this, too. While dogs and coyotes pant, owls use something called ‘gular fluttering’ which is flapping the loose skin under the throat to move air over the throat cavity. Vultures urinate on their legs to keep cool, another form of evaporative cooling!

That last fact makes me appreciate anew the way we humans use sweat to keep ourselves from overheating.

Stay cool, everybody.

Wasps: One Sign of a Healthy Ecosystem

When I started teaching at Merritt College, I was “given” the Environmental Center property as a place to hold my labs - basically, as a place to grow a garden. In years past, it had been used for that purpose (though, I would argue, not to its full potential), and even held a few remnants of the old raised beds. But it had long been abandoned and unused; my co-workers had several truckloads of junk and trash hauled away, which revealed a rather shabby and sad space. The ground was either rocky, or covered in weeds. The outbuildings were mostly being taken over by nature, with mushrooms growing out of roof tiles and critters nesting in walls. Invasive Himalayan blackberry vines covered every corner. The first lab I held there, I had the students spend an hour just being in the space, mapping it out, taking an inventory of what was there, noting how the sun might move across the sky, how the wind moved through the space, and what they thought could be done with the property to make it a ‘real’ farm. On that day, I watched them move through what would eventually become our garden, and took my own inventory of the space. And I realized something that day. I realized that there were no bugs.

A female (identified by the curled antennae) tarantula hawk-wasp taking a break in the Environmental Center garden, on my newly formed paths

Actually, no birds either, except one curious scrub jay. No scuttling lizards. Nothing zooming past, not even a pesky fly. Now, sure, it was late January, but that’s no deterrent in coastal California. If it’s above 50 degrees (and it was, that day, as it is nearly every day of the year in Oakland), bugs are generally out getting some stuff done. But not at the Environmental Center.

My feeling was that the space had been abandoned so long, and was so full of invasive (rather than native) plants, and was so crowded with non-flowering weeds (mostly exotic grasses), that nothing really wanted to live there. This is not an uncommon thing. Urban spaces are increasing across the globe, destroying valuable habitat for all kinds of creatures. How can an insect live in a place with only concrete, glass, and steel? Urban spaces not only lack flowering plants, they also often devoid of any kind of slow-moving water, crucial for drinking but also for many insect nurseries. Cities trap heat to become even hotter than their surroundings, becoming ‘urban heat islands,’ uninhabitable to many species. Vehicles rush around, creating dangerous circumstances for any surviving insect just trying to get from here to there. And people are fearful of insects, generally, and are quick to squash and kill anything they don’t understand.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, insects are absolutely vital to our human lives. Not only do they provide pollination services, they are a critical food source for so many animals that live further up the food chain. Many, like wasps, are also important biological controls, keeping a check on other insects, feeding them to their young. And others, including yellow jackets, are valuable detritivores, cleaning up dead animals and other organic matter so that we are not buried in refuse.

A common blue mud-dauber wasp dragging a spider to its nest to feed its larvae, at the Environmental Center

I know that over the (almost) ten years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve given some mixed messages regarding pests. I have used yellow jacket traps in the past. I mean, yellow jackets are annoying as hell, there’s no question about that. Eating outdoors is one of the absolute joys of summer, and some yellow jackets make that next to impossible. They also bug my chickens and my honeybees, which I don’t like. So for many years, I rationalized my trapping, until I started to read more about general insect decline and the way that decline affects us. (By the way, if this is something you’re interested in learning more about, I’d recommend checking out Dr. Dave Goulson, or Dr. Doug Tallamy.) Now, I make it a practice not to kill any insect on purpose, and rather to learn as much about them as I can. I find that when I learn more about something, I become fascinated with it, and that in turn leads me to appreciate it fully.

This point was driven home to me when my folks shared that they’d recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how beneficial yellow jackets really are. I had been talking about insects in a positive light for years, but it wasn’t until my parents read an article for themselves that they had greater fascination for the subject. This made me realize that, though I’ve written on this subject before (here, and here and here, among others) it really bears writing about again.

There are several different kinds of yellow jacket wasps in California. They are generally either in the Vespula or Dolicovespula genera. Some nest in the ground, in old rodent burrows, and some nest in walls or trees; some that are strictly insect-and-nectar eaters, and some which are scavengers. The scavengers are the ones that annoy us at picnics. They are also the ones who generally will enter a trap. However, the others are great for ecosystem health, and deserve our respect and admiration.

A yellow jacket pollinating at Poppy Corners

And there are many other interesting wasps, such as the ones in the photos near the top of this post. Many wasps, such as the tarantula hawk-wasp and the common blue mud dauber wasp, take other bugs home to their nests to feed their young. The tarantula hawk-wasp, for instance, stings a tarantula between the legs (!) and drags it back to the nest, where it then lays one egg on the spider, takes pains to keep the spider alive until the egg hatches into a larva, which then feeds on the living spider until it pupates. I mean, the stuff of nightmares, yes? And yet also intriguing. Other predatory wasps do this with the very caterpillars that threaten to eat our crops.

In fact, in a 2021 study by the University of London, it was shown that “predation by insects -- as biocontrol to protect crops -- is worth at least $416 billion (US) per year worldwide,” and that wasps actually regulate populations of agricultural insects. This is a priceless service.

Another priceless service that wasps perform is pollination. Many wasps use nectar for their primary source of daily energy (the ‘meat’ is for larval development only), and the study states, “pollination by insects is vital for agriculture, and its economic importance has been valued at greater than $250 billion (US) per year worldwide.” These are not small numbers. Our food supply is already under threat, for oh so many reasons - so let’s use any and all of the free ecosystem services that nature provides us, shall we?

an old paper wasp nest in the eaves of our train shed at Poppy Corners

With all of these services firmly in mind, at the Environmental Center, one of the first jobs I gave the students was to plant a pollinator garden. I had obtained a grant for seed from Pollinator Partnership, and they sent us a large bag of various native California wildflower seeds. We knew that our vegetable and fruit plantings would attract pollinators, but we wanted to ensure as much diversity as possible, and that seed grant gave us another 30 species of flowers with which to attract and feed insects. (Also deer, but that’s a story for another time.) And once the goldfields started coming up, and the tidy tips, then the gilia and the poppies, the bugs started arriving - hover flies came first, then honeybees, then butterflies, and finally now, on these hot summer days, I’m finally seeing the wasps. I’m delighted. Now that there is the buzzing and zooming in the air, I’m starting to see lizards, and skinks, and snakes. Birds of all kinds have found us. Each of these species brings a new set of challenges, but that’s ok - we know that having a healthy ecosystem brings far more benefits than it does problems.

As the garden evolves, my plans for it does, too. I intend, this fall, to have one class build an herb spiral and plant fruit bushes and trees, which will attract even more pollinators. Another class is going to create a garden full of traditional, cultural crops, which should bring in even more native insects. I look forward to seeing the ecosystem develop and create a closed loop, where everything within the loop thrives, including the humans who eat the food grown there.

Reader Question - Vermicomposting

A reader named Jen writes, “I am considering getting a vermicomposter, and the options range from high end to low cost: https://www.epicgardening.com/best-worm-composter/ The Worm Factory starts at $146 and others are more moderately priced, in the $100 range. The Hungry Bin is a whopping $346! Here are my questions: Should I invest in a more expensive worm bin and if so, why? Should I release some worms into my garden so that the birds have more to eat over the winter? Am I really doing anything about the impending doom of climate change by vermicomposting?”

Full disclosure, Jen is a close friend of mine from childhood. She lives in NC, in Chapel Hill, which is USDA Zone 7b. She lives in a forested area and has a lovely Japanese style garden, as well as some meadow plantings.

We all know the benefits of composting, so I don’t need to go through those again. Our awareness of food waste has been growing lately, and it’s good to figure out some sort of system for dealing with that (besides re-thinking your shopping and cooking habits, which I’ve had to do myself with our teenage son away at college). Chickens or pigs is ideal for this - nothing gets wasted if you have livestock to eat your leftovers. But worms are another livestock option that are ideal for those of us who don’t have the property allowance for larger animals.

I’ve used worms in various ways for years.

I’ve had an official worm bin, which was used by and then given to me by a neighbor, and it was an interesting experience.

These are usually a set of stacked bins. The top few have a perforated bottom, to let worms and leachate move between them, and the bottom one has a solid bottom to keep everything inside. There is also usually a spigot of some kind which allows you to drain off the leachate (basically worm pee). You then dilute this liquid and use it as a fertilizer. Additionally, the castings (poop) are removed periodically and added to your pots or beds.

I found this sort of system high-maintenance. It needs to be in an area that is protected from rain (there are openings in the top to allow air circulation); the top is easily removed by predators who eat all the worms (hence my putting rocks on top); you need to have a lot of leaves or newspaper or some other carbon source available to soak up all the nitrogen that is being produced (poop); and, when it’s time to empty the bins of worm castings, you have to somehow “sift” out the worms, which is supposed to happen naturally with the perforated bottoms but, in my experience, doesn’t work. I used it for about a year and then put it in the recycle bin (after removing all the worms and stuff and putting them in my regular compost).

I can see that this sort of system would be perfect for someone who doesn’t have any outdoor space - a balcony, or a garage, or even a laundry room could host a stack like this. But the mess you make when you remove the compost would make it less than ideal for indoor spaces. If you have very harsh winters, this system could also be good, but again, not easy to maintain indoors. Some people make their own worm bins which is far cheaper than buying something pre-made.

Something I have found far more sustainable is to have an enclosed outdoor compost bin of smaller stature, one made of natural materials that is open to the ground below. My dad made me one like this years ago, a two-compartment bin of old redwood decking, with a hinged lid and removable front panels. Because the bin is so small (3’x3’x3’), it doesn’t hold enough material to get hot enough to break down easily. My way around this is to buy worms every other year, and add them to the bin.

There is likely a worm farmer near you, wherever you live, where you can buy a couple of pounds of red wigglers for about $20 a pound (which you’ll need to do for a worm bin, as well). They will mate and produce more worms, but they also crawl out of the bin and into the surrounding garden, get eaten by birds, etc. So that’s why I buy them every couple of years. They really speed up the composting of my smaller bin.

I don’t bother to add any worms to the big compost pile that resides in the chicken run. First of all, they’d just get eaten by the chickens. Secondly, that pile breaks down faster anyway for many reasons - it’s bigger (more volume), it has its own dedicated sprinkler, and it gets turned by the chickens every single day. There are definitely worms in it - I see them every time I go to collect the finished stuff at the bottom - which have arrived from the surrounding garden.

And that brings me to something else you need to consider - there are already a ton of worms in your existing landscape. They are there even if the soil has been neglected for years. They reside deep inside the moist layers of soil. Rain brings them closer to the surface, as does organic matter. If you have a woodsy area, worms are part of the great soil ecosystem that breaks down all that organic matter - only a small part, to be sure, as bacteria and fungi do most of the work of decomposing the litter that lies on our soil surfaces. The very best way to ensure that you have an active and healthy soil ecosystem is to provide it plenty of organic matter. Don’t remove leaves. Add mulch to bare ground. And you may even want to bury your food scraps out in the landscape - just dig a hole next to a bush or a tree, put your scraps in, and cover them with soil. This is called “composting in place” and many people swear by it. There is a permaculture method called a “keyhole” planting bed, which is a raised bed shaped like a circle, with one path in to the center of the circle so you can reach everything. In that center, you place a wire basket (open to the bottom and the top). In that, you layer leaves and grass and food scraps, and it breaks down right into your bed.

I even had a horticulture professor who basically laid his food scraps down around his fruit trees, not even bothering to bury them! This looks unattractive but is effective. In my neighborhood that would attract even more nighttime creatures, so I need a more organized way to deal with scraps.

As for the birds, something like 98% of bird species feed insects to their young, even if they are seed eaters normally. The young need protein, and the best source of that is insects. Birds need a variety and abundance of insects, and so if you appreciate birds, the best thing you can do for them is to provide insects. Worms that live in the ground are good for some bird species, but worms that live on leaves are much better for a vast number of bird species. Worms that live on leaves, also called caterpillars, are usually a larval stage of many insects. So, as we’ve discussed before, there are many things you can do to increase insects in the garden: stop using pesticides; plant a variety of flowering trees, perennials, annuals, vegetables, and herbs; provide water in shallow dishes; and allow for different habitats - some mulched spaces, some bare dirt spaces, tree snags, piles of logs, etc. Be a slightly messy gardener! Don’t clean up too much. For more on this subject. you would do well to read “Bringing Nature Home” by Doug Tallamy.

And as for climate change and the state of our planet, any action we take as individuals can only help the situation, so I encourage you to compost in any way you can. If a worm bin is going to be the thing that gets you there, then do it. Individual actions allow us to feel as though we are part of the solution and give us hope, so they are important from a mental health standpoint as well. But we also need to realize that it’s going to take global action and policy to really shift the world towards a completely different thinking about climate change. I’m not saying that your individual actions don’t matter. They do. But as individuals, we really don’t have the power necessary to make a significant change. That’s why we need to be proactive about voting for people and policies that support making these big changes.

I hope this helps you to make a decision about whether or not to get a worm bin, Jen! Thank you so much for your question. I’ll be interested to see if anyone else has some other advice for you, perhaps a system that worked particularly well for them, or ideas for making your own bin.

With warmth

When the daytime highs reach the mid-60’s, and the nighttime highs inch close to 50, I know that things are truly going to start hopping in the garden. Flowers feel safe enough to bloom; warm-season veg begins to put forth tiny buds; and the insects start to wake up. I’ve noticed native bees in more numbers, flies hanging about the compost pile, and even a butterfly or two. And today, I spotted my first paper wasp. I like paper wasps. They are excellent pollinators and good predators of the kind of caterpillars that I don’t want (like tomato hornworms). They aren’t aggressive and stick mostly to themselves, so I welcome them every year to the eaves of the train shed where they build their nests. But, if paper wasps have arrived, that means yellow jackets will soon follow. I feel a bit differently about yellow jackets.

Yellow jacket queens overwinter in their underground dens, emerging (as so many insects do) with sun and light in spring. They are looking for food and a mate. If we can trap the queen before she mates or lay eggs, we can break one tiny part of the cycle now, and hopefully have less of them over the summer months. Today I put one by the chicken coop and one by the beehive, because those are both areas where YJs like to hang out. Let me be clear: I don’t want to eradicate all YJs; after all, they are an important part of the ecosystem and valuable because they eat dead things. But even if I wanted to, I could never get rid of them all. There will always be plenty of them. So I’m just trying to put a little dent in the population. If you’re in agreement with me, now’s the time to start putting out traps. The one above is the only kind that has every worked for me. Those plastic round things are useless, in my opinion.

This warmish weather also brings other creatures out of their dens, namely the college administrator who is on video and phone meetings from early morning till evening. Any outdoor spot is a good place for that, as long as it’s quiet. And it has definitely been quiet, although there are a lot of people doing house projects right now (and why not?), which means the college administrator is also taking a fair amount of meetings from the bedroom with the doors and windows closed.

Warm weather also causes the winter veg to bolt. These are Brussels sprouts flowers, aren’t they pretty? Like all members of the mustard family, they attract lots of bees. I’ve been feeding the chickens one of these plants each day. I just cut it off at the base and throw it to them, and they strip it to the stalk. Chickens love brassicas. Not so much the chard or beets, a different family of plants altogether.

I’ve planted potatoes - three kinds (Russet, French Fingerling, and Yukon Gold) for three different harvest times, and also seeded some sunflowers in cow pots for later transplant. This weekend, Tom and I are hoping to work on a new way to trellis tomatoes. What are you working on in your garden?