God, this is so infuriatingly true. A few months ago I searched for info on types of spiders in my province, because I wanted to learn more about my many housemates. All of the top links were SEO blog spam that were clearly duplicate pages rebranded for different keywords (something that Google’s algorithm used to penalize but apparently no longer gives a shit about). I know this because, no, black widows are not fucking native to Manitoba, Canada.
Not to mention that goddamn annoying way of writing that SEO blog spam uses where they are so obviously reaching for long tail keywords. My job used to involve some of this stuff back when the search engines pretended to care about good content - when you were at least nominally rewarded with page rank for content that read like it was written by a person with a soul. Now it’s just a wasteland of mechanical prose. There’s still good stuff being said out there, but good like finding it with a search engine.
There are two species of black widow spider in Canada: the western black widow found in parts of BC through to Manitoba (mostly restricted to areas close to the southern Canada-U.S. border) and the northern black widow in southern and eastern Ontario. On occasion, black widow spiders occur outside of their ranges by hitching a ride on produce such as grapes.
Well, crap. Now I’m going to be irrationally afraid of a run-in with an illusive grape-riding Black Widow.
I did know about foreign spiders hitching a ride on produce. I just didn’t know that these dudes could take root in our cold wasteland. Nonetheless, thanks for the link!
No worries, if your heart is in decent shape, you’re actually not in much danger from a black widow, as far as I know. It’s mostly the elderly and the really young who die from their bites these days.
Good to know. Nevertheless, I hope to never be in a situation where I get to find out. I’m guessing they’re suuuuper rare here. I checked the iNaturalist app and there were no observed sightings of either type mentioned in that article.
There’s probably just a colony in the back of a supermarket somewhere.
I can see them surviving in the wild in Vancouver, but here in MB it regularly gets to -30 to -40 for several months in the winter. I’m not sure they’d like that too much.
That said, maybe your dad’s house is a supermarket. Does he have lots of food in it?
God, this is so infuriatingly true. A few months ago I searched for info on types of spiders in my province, because I wanted to learn more about my many housemates. All of the top links were SEO blog spam that were clearly duplicate pages rebranded for different keywords (something that Google’s algorithm used to penalize but apparently no longer gives a shit about). I know this because, no, black widows are not fucking native to Manitoba, Canada.
Not to mention that goddamn annoying way of writing that SEO blog spam uses where they are so obviously reaching for long tail keywords. My job used to involve some of this stuff back when the search engines pretended to care about good content - when you were at least nominally rewarded with page rank for content that read like it was written by a person with a soul. Now it’s just a wasteland of mechanical prose. There’s still good stuff being said out there, but good like finding it with a search engine.
Sorry my dude, but according to this they are.
Well, crap. Now I’m going to be irrationally afraid of a run-in with an illusive grape-riding Black Widow.
I did know about foreign spiders hitching a ride on produce. I just didn’t know that these dudes could take root in our cold wasteland. Nonetheless, thanks for the link!
No worries, if your heart is in decent shape, you’re actually not in much danger from a black widow, as far as I know. It’s mostly the elderly and the really young who die from their bites these days.
Good to know. Nevertheless, I hope to never be in a situation where I get to find out. I’m guessing they’re suuuuper rare here. I checked the iNaturalist app and there were no observed sightings of either type mentioned in that article.
There’s probably just a colony in the back of a supermarket somewhere.
I’m from Vancouver, and there was definitely a few that lived out back of my dad’s house when I was a teen. TIL my dad’s house was a supermarket!
I can see them surviving in the wild in Vancouver, but here in MB it regularly gets to -30 to -40 for several months in the winter. I’m not sure they’d like that too much.
That said, maybe your dad’s house is a supermarket. Does he have lots of food in it?
Well…he’s definitely a better cook than my mum, but I’d say more like regular amount of food?