Young females are more fertile and easy to woo; older females often mate and then eat the male alive. No wonder they’re called widow spiders. To get sex with an older female, a male might fight ...

A relative of the black widow, the brown widow has lighter-colored markings, pale legs with dark joints, and a yellow-orange hourglass marking on its abdomen. The bite is neuropathic like the ...

but male redback spiders are brown, while male black widow spiders are black or gray. However, this is not where their ...

A relative of the black widow, the brown widow has lighter-colored markings, pale legs with dark joints, and a yellow-orange hourglass marking on its abdomen. The bite is neuropathic like the ...

The animals most at risk from the black widow's bite are insects—and male black widow spiders. Females sometimes kill and eat their counterparts after mating in a macabre behavior that gave the ...