I get the sentiment, but black widows (and Theridiidae in general) are quite proficient in taking out wolf spiders and other prowling spiders, not the other way around.
I’m going to need to see some videos before I can determine who is winning this debate. With heavy metal background music, though I would also accept a David Attenborough narration. With and without the wolf spider swarm.
sigh For completion sake, should probably also check out some videos of each of those spiders vs other things like scorpions, mice, mongeese, non-mon geese, snakes, etc.
I wouldn’t recommend those types of videos. These are just the arthropod version of cock- or dog fighting and basically animal abuse. They also don’t actually teach you much, since the scenarios don’t reflect their actual behaviour in nature.
For example, almost every active hunting spider will kill a black widow if you put them in an enclosed space together. But in the real world the widows would be in her web where something like a wolfspider would get trapped long before getting close to the widow spider.
Yeah, they are morally dubious at best. But there’s just something about watching things fight to the death that makes it so fascinating. Though I agree that it is best if they are each in their own natural environments rather than just shoved in a glass box together. They should have the option to disengage, too, because it’s also interesting to know when two killing machines opt to not try each other (and based on the one video I did see of wolf spider vs black widow, I’d guess most of them would go that way because the wolf spider wasn’t very interested in getting anywhere close to the widow and only killed it in the end because it kept trying to web it up).
That makes me wonder how many of the animal vs gladiator fights would have resulted in them walking away from each other.
I get the sentiment, but black widows (and Theridiidae in general) are quite proficient in taking out wolf spiders and other prowling spiders, not the other way around.
I’m going to need to see some videos before I can determine who is winning this debate. With heavy metal background music, though I would also accept a David Attenborough narration. With and without the wolf spider swarm.
sigh For completion sake, should probably also check out some videos of each of those spiders vs other things like scorpions, mice, mongeese, non-mon geese, snakes, etc.
I wouldn’t recommend those types of videos. These are just the arthropod version of cock- or dog fighting and basically animal abuse. They also don’t actually teach you much, since the scenarios don’t reflect their actual behaviour in nature.
For example, almost every active hunting spider will kill a black widow if you put them in an enclosed space together. But in the real world the widows would be in her web where something like a wolfspider would get trapped long before getting close to the widow spider.
Yeah, they are morally dubious at best. But there’s just something about watching things fight to the death that makes it so fascinating. Though I agree that it is best if they are each in their own natural environments rather than just shoved in a glass box together. They should have the option to disengage, too, because it’s also interesting to know when two killing machines opt to not try each other (and based on the one video I did see of wolf spider vs black widow, I’d guess most of them would go that way because the wolf spider wasn’t very interested in getting anywhere close to the widow and only killed it in the end because it kept trying to web it up).
That makes me wonder how many of the animal vs gladiator fights would have resulted in them walking away from each other.