[quote=njtosd][quote=sdsurfer]Thanks for chiming in! I definitely know ours are black widows with the hourglass red mark on the bottom. We are going to do a bit of research and perhaps I’ll post the outcome to this string.[/quote]
The brown widows also have orange-ish red hourglass markings. I read somewhere that they are almost impossible to distinguish by sight alone . . . Although I don’t want to get close enough to try :).[/quote]
In our experience, the shapes are similar, but the legs on the brown widows are striped, and browns tend to be a bit smaller. The bodies can be light or darker brown. They have the orange hourglass marking on the underside which can be brilliant, or a bit faded and difficult to see.
One way to know if you have brown widows is to look under your patio furniture for their eggs. They have a distinct spiky egg sac — it’s white, about half an inch in diameter, and looks like an underwater mine.
Like this (some good pics of the brown widow, too):
They might look menacing, but they haven’t given us any problems, and we sit on our patio furniture all the time, which is where they like to hang out. They tend to hide more, and the ones we have haven’t shown any aggressive tendencies.
