Skip to content
ScienceBlog.com
  • Featured Blogs
    • EU Horizon Blog
    • ESA Tracker
    • Experimental Frontiers
    • Josh Mitteldorf’s Aging Matters
    • Dr. Lu Zhang’s Gondwanaland
    • NeuroEdge
    • NIAAA
    • SciChi
    • The Poetry of Science
    • Wild Science
  • Topics
    • Brain & Behavior
    • Earth, Energy & Environment
    • Health
    • Life & Non-humans
    • Physics & Mathematics
    • Social Sciences
    • Space
    • Technology
  • Our Substack
  • Follow Us!
    • Bluesky
    • Threads
    • FaceBook
    • Google News
    • Twitter/X
  • Contribute/Contact

Spider Behavior

Black widow spiders have earned a fearsome reputation for their venomous bite. But in parts of the southern United States these spiders have much to fear themselves—from spider relatives who really don't like their company. In the past couple decades, researchers have noticed black widow spiders (adult female shown at right) commonly being displaced by the brown widow (adult female at left), a fellow species in the same genus, Latrodectus. But new research suggests this isn't a just simple case of one species winning the competition for food or habitat. Instead, a study shows brown widow spiders have a striking propensity to seek out and kill nearby black widows. (Note: Images are not shown to matching scale and thus do not reflect relative sizes of the two spiders.)

Brown widow spiders’ aggression likely driver of black widow decline

Substack subscription form sign up

Comments

  • Ashok Kumar on Machine Learning Matched the Right Lifestyle Fix to Each Depressed Patient, Doubling Remission Rates
  • Curtis Webber on The GPS-Killer? This Quantum Device ‘Feels’ Motion Like a Brain—Down to the Atomic Level
  • Ran on How the Age You First Had Sex Could Shape How You Age Decades Later
  • Sparty on How the Age You First Had Sex Could Shape How You Age Decades Later
  • Josh Mitteldorf on A Single TV Segment Sent Leucovorin Prescriptions for Autistic Children Soaring 2,000 Percent
© 2026 ScienceBlog.com | Follow our RSS / XML feed