
The Red Hourglass: Self-Experimentation with Black Widow Bites - nkurz
https://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0598/grice/excerpt.html?
======
djcapelis
A friend of mine got bit by one once. She showed up in the hospital and calmly
explained that she got bit by a black widow and asked for the anti venin. They
looked at her skeptically until she pulled out a baggie with the dead widow in
it. Then they treated her right away.

If you find yourself bit, kill the spider and take it with you. You'll
forestall any complaints and questions about whether you're sure it was a
black widow and shorten the time to diagnose and begin treatment. (I.E. You'll
experience far fewer of the symptoms the sooner you get treated.)

(Unfortunately as of a few days ago, there is still a storage of supplies for
the antivenin:
[http://www.ashp.org/menu/DrugShortages/CurrentShortages/bull...](http://www.ashp.org/menu/DrugShortages/CurrentShortages/bulletin.aspx?id=670)
So some hospitals may not have it in stock if they normally would. But
apparently emergency supplies remain.)

~~~
andrewflnr
I've just been bitten by a spider, and I'm supposed to calmly and _quickly_
corner it, kill it, and scrape it into a baggie to show to the doctor? I'm
supposed to do this after reading this article, knowing what's ahead of me?

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Dunno if they milk spiders, but extra points for capturing it live so it can
donate venom. I'm probably confused and this only works with snakes.

~~~
kondro
They do milk spiders, but antivenom is generally created by injecting small
amounts into animals like horses until they build up antibodies that are used
to create antivenom.

~~~
dwd
No one has died of a Sydney funnel web bite since the milking program started.
They're quite aggressive too.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8svYyihCqsg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8svYyihCqsg)

------
srean
What amazes me is the question: what kind of evolutionary pressure would drive
creatures to develop stings and venom this viscious. I would have thought
nature would stop optimizing once a sting is a good enough deterrent. It is as
if someone said, no, I would optimize the crap out of this chemical weapon.

I have always been intrigued by how much does the effect generalize across the
victim species. Consider tarantula wasps, their sting take pain and suffering
to new heights (for humans). But really what the wasps use it for, primarily,
is to temporarily immobilize a tarantula so that it can lay eggs on it. The
hatchlings end up eating the tarantula. If temporary immobilization is the
main use case (surely not the only use case), must it be this painful. Is the
tarantula in as much pain and if so what purpose is that serving ? It seems
something that gives them a pleasure trip makes more sense.

~~~
dboat
Nature doesn't "optimize" like that exactly.

Naturally selection is a process of random mutations. The ancient ancestor of
the first black widow might not have been some peculiar middle ground between
benign and lethal, yet the random mutation of offspring which proliferated
merely happened to be highly deadly.

Along that vein, I wonder if there have been random black window mutations
since which have been even more lethal, but since this did not present a
significant survival advantage, they did not live long enough to become a
distinct species.

~~~
melloclello
There's a paper on latrotoxins available, "Molecular Evolution of
α-Latrotoxin, the Exceptionally Potent Vertebrate Neurotoxin in Black Widow
Spider Venom":

[http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/5/999.full](http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/5/999.full)

It's way over my head though and I actually have no idea if it's backing up or
refuting your claim.

------
farmfood
My 6 yr-old daughter asked me to get rid of a spider from her room. In I went
with a "ho ho ho, of course dear" fatherly attitude to find a mature female
Black Widow sat on the rocker switch of her bedside lamp. I calmly asked my
little girl to go fetch her mother.

~~~
karmajunkie
I know the feeling. Once last year my four year old refused to go to sleep,
yelling about monsters in his room. Somewhat exasperated, I went into his room
and turned on the light to find the biggest scorpion I'd ever seen crawling up
his wall. I had a hell of a time arguing with him when he got convinced about
monsters lurking for six months afterwards.

Wasn't sad to move out of that apartment.

~~~
Htsthbjig
Big scorpions are not dangerous. The most dangerous scorpions tend to be
smaller ones. This I leaned from Sahara desert natives. I found a small one
under a rock and played with it. Those people got crazy at me.

------
cc439
" A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which
has a high molecular weight--in fact, _the molecules are large enough to be
seen under an ordinary microscope. "_

Does anyone have another source for this, maybe a photo? I spent some time
looking around but I can't find anything relevant and it seems a little hard
to believe.

~~~
dwhly
Unless the molecular weight is about 10 pentillion (?) you ain't gonna see
diddly! Avogadro's number is a big thing. (6 x 10^23). Now agreed that you
don't need a mole of something (especially w/ a high molecular weight) to be
able to see it in a microscope. But it's probably at least w/in 4 to 5 orders
of magnitude of the right number.

~~~
drjesusphd
DNA is a molecule, and under the right conditions, you can see it under a
microscope as chromosomes.

~~~
pmalynin
Only when it is _highly_ condensed. In ordinary conditions you need something
like xray crystallography.

~~~
kghose
Right, only during cell division and you need the right stain.

------
jqm
Nuts. I would have probably stuck with lab rats.

I was bit by a brown recluse as a kid. The symptoms were nothing like this but
it did create a large nasty looking hole in my calf that seemed to grow for a
couple of weeks rotting the flesh. It was unpleasant but not all that painful
considering.

In addition to the recluse bite, I have been stung by bees, wasps, jellyfish
and a scorpion but the worst was from nothing less than a caterpillar. It
happened twice... two different kinds of caterpillars (the first one I put my
hand on climbing a tree, the second I actually picked up). It was not to the
level described in the article, but some of the same type symptoms appeared.
My arm ached with horrible muscle pains, I felt symptoms throughout my body
and I felt extremely ill for a day or so. I was around 10 or 12 at the time,
we had just moved to Florida and I was quite surprised to learn that some
caterpillars stung. I don't live there anymore but am still extremely wary of
caterpillars that have any fuzz or hair.

~~~
mc_hammer
weird - i got the same thing from a catapiller - i had no idea this was really
a thing!

~~~
harshreality
In grade school, there was a tree we used to play near after school, and a
fellow student cautioned several times about "asps" [asp caterpillars] around
that tree. I never actually saw one, but he must have known about the things
from somewhere else and had seen one in the vicinity.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopyge_opercularis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopyge_opercularis)

From the description, I think of it like a venomous version of those fine-
spined cacti often seen in miniature cactus arrangements.

~~~
jqm
Yes, one was very similar to that one in the link but whiter.

The other was something like this
[http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/Portals/0/Gardening/G...](http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/Portals/0/Gardening/Gardening%20Help/images/Pests/Caterpillars_Surface1224.jpg)

(you can see why I picked him up).

These things are serious, at least they were for me. Worst animal trauma ever.
I don't know if anyone has ever died from one but I think they should be more
publicized.

------
hornbaker
If you like stories like this, don't miss the one of the veterinarian who
infested himself with cat ear mites and documented the results:

[http://kimberlymoynahan.com/2012/10/of-mites-and-
men/](http://kimberlymoynahan.com/2012/10/of-mites-and-men/)

------
nkurz
If anyone has access to the 1934 paper Blair wrote about this, I'd love to
read it. My address is in my HN profile.

    
    
      SPIDER POISONING: EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF THE  
      BITE OF THE FEMALE LATRODECTUS MACTANS IN MAN
      A. W. BLAIR, M.D.
      Arch Intern Med (Chic). 1934;54(6):831-843.
      doi:10.1001/archinte.1934.00160180003001.

~~~
mikexstudios
Great find! Here you go:
[https://mega.co.nz/#!bcUjRZoB!2nZjyURearxqO-0DDxUA57UnzEa1jh...](https://mega.co.nz/#!bcUjRZoB!2nZjyURearxqO-0DDxUA57UnzEa1jhtVp2Uw7F7IMhU)

~~~
csours
A link to Mega... Great now people will think we're hackers.

------
jfb
I was bitten by a brown recluse as a kid; I had a scar the size of a quarter
on my leg from the skin necrosis. The only lasting effect was an acute
arachnophobia.

~~~
dwd
I was bitten by a brown house spider (Steatoda grossa) years ago and found the
dead spider in my bed sheet.

It left me feeling sick, unable to eat and struggling to drink for days due to
the pain from my throat right through to my abdomen. Apparently the redback
anti-venom works for it.

Kill them on sight now along with the very rare redback or white-tail and lots
of huntsman. We also get a few black house spiders which I generally leave
unless they are moving about.

As mentioned in another comment nothing beats an irukandji for pain. It also
has an interesting story of self-experimentation to pin down the jellyfish as
the cause of Irukandji Syndrome:

[http://lifeinthefastlane.com/jack-barnes-and-the-
irukandji-e...](http://lifeinthefastlane.com/jack-barnes-and-the-irukandji-
enigma/)

~~~
jfb
I have no idea how you people survive to adulthood.

~~~
dwd
Ha, and I didn't even mention the snakes...

You can do certain things to minimise your risk of getting bitten, or not.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wynx1ukwdVA&feature=kp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wynx1ukwdVA&feature=kp)

------
pjungwir
When I lived in southern California, black widows were pretty common. A few
tips:

\- They like to hang out in wood piles or corners of the garage.

\- Their webs look "messy". Also the webs are pretty tough and don't tear
easily. You can pluck them like guitar strings.

~~~
aaronem
More generally, they like dark, cool places where they aren't likely to be
disturbed. For a few years in my childhood, my mother and I shared a small
house with a widow who'd set up housekeeping between the toilet tank and the
wall; we got along fine, no doubt as much due to her ability to keep well fed
in an old and not well constructed rural home, as to the respect we were
careful to maintain in our dealings with her.

------
Friedduck
I had a great aunt die from a bite by a Brown Recluse. All this did was
solidify my fear of spiders in general. What I remember of it (I was young
when this happened) was that the bite was misdiagnosed initially as nothing
serious and she was sent home with a topical ointment.

Things went downhill fast. I know that the limb that was bitten was amputated,
and that by the time they figured out the cause her fate was sealed. I know
they're supposed to be beneficial insects but I kill just about every one I
encounter to this day.

At least the Black Widow is distinctive. It's unmistakable if you see one.

------
softbuilder
Thankfully the Black Widow is one of the dumbest spiders I've every
encountered. Amazingly easy to kill if you can be calm about it. (I feel like
I should be knocking on wood now.) I don't know how many varieties there are
though, so YMMV.

~~~
flatline
The only time I've definitively seen one was in my kitchen. I put it in a
Tupperware and let it loose in the yard. It was so slow moving that I was
never particularly concerned about being bit.

I had no idea the bite was that bad or I would have just finished it off
instead.

~~~
softbuilder
I lived for a few years in a particularly widow-prone area and had many black
widows in the house and garage. I eventually realized that the daddy-long-legs
variant in my house seemed to compete handily with them. So I stopped cleaning
webs and found I had far fewer black widows. My house appeared rather shabby
though. Tradeoffs.

------
ZenPro
This thread, more than any other, illustrates why the majority of posters
should be ignored.

Approximately 50% of the posts are preceded with a variation of -

"I am just speculating but..."

Why on earth would 99.9% of the people on this thread think they have the
expertise to offer an opinion of the evolution of arachnid venom is beyond me.

Fascinating article, even more fascinating watching humans debate like blind
people in the dark.

------
isaacdl
This reminds me of Alexander Shulgin, who died a few days ago (there was an
article here on HN [0]). Sometimes the most interesting and useful science is
self-experimentation!

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839226)

------
girvo
I've been bitten by a Redback Spider (related to the Black Widow, I believe),
twice! As a kid I was fascinated by insects and spiders, and used to love
watching them for hours. As it turns out, Redbacks hurt a lot, its one of the
worst bites I've experienced. A sharp sensation, followed by a burning and
prickliness. Horrible. Parents took me to the hospital straight away, as it
made me feel really sick (I was 10 years old the first time, and 11 the
second). After the second time I sort of learned my lesson...

------
dm2
Brown Recluse spiders are very common where I live and I've known countless
people who have been bitten by them and ended up with a necrosis wound.

Unfortunately the Brown Recluse spider looks very similar to many harmless
spiders, so if there is a brown spider I usually don't take any chances unless
I can positively identify it.

Supposedly Black Widows are in my area also, but I've never seen one.

I do let these guys stay in my house most of the time:
[http://www.spiders.us/species/pholcus-
phalangioides/](http://www.spiders.us/species/pholcus-phalangioides/)

I'm not sure how I feel about this though:
[http://www.spiders.us/files/pholcus-
phalangioides-5.jpg](http://www.spiders.us/files/pholcus-phalangioides-5.jpg)
Spiders don't creep me out at all, but a large group of spiders would, even
though I've heard that their fangs cannot pierce human skin.

BTW, changing the original articles main layout table (15 year old site I'm
guessing) to 1800px makes the article much more readable. I found it hard to
read the 270px wide article with 1 foot of white space on each side.

------
derefr
> The toxin somehow flips a switch that activates a self-torture mechanism.

Anyone have a clearer explanation for the psychopharmacology at work here?

------
jonah
> Forney later commented, "I do not recall having seen more abject pain
> manifested in any other medical or surgical condition."

Yikes!

~~~
danpat
The world is full of stingy-bitey things that use chemicals rather than force,
for example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irukandji_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irukandji_syndrome)

Choice quotes:

> most cases require intravenous opioid analgesia ...

and

> One unusual symptom associated with the syndrome is a feeling of "impending
> doom".[13] Patients have been reported as being so certain they are going to
> die, they beg their doctors to kill them to get it over with.

~~~
jfb
Any chance to link to the Schmidt Pain Scale[1]!

 _1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone
has fired a staple into your cheek._

[1] [http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/05/16/schmidt-
pa...](http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/05/16/schmidt-pain-index-
which-sting/)

~~~
jqm
That was a great link.

(from the comments which have no shortage of bug bite stories...) "The guy
should have let one bug sting him on the back of each hand, then see which
hand grabbed the other in pain. That way he could compare them semi-directly,
sort of like the rock hardness scratch tests. That’d involve a lot of extra
stings, but it’s for a good cause..."

------
theviciousfish
masochism at its finest

------
abelnation
NOPE

