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When ecology graduate student Lindsay Miles visited Las Vegas a few years ago, she had a clear objective in mind. “I’m looking for the really gross, dirty alleyways,” she tells The Scientist. Scouring these alleys after dark, Miles—with a colleague accompanying her for safety—located thin, wispy webs tucked away in concrete nooks and crannies. With great care and a bowl-like scoop, she trapped western black widow spiders (Latrodectus hesperus) clinging to the silk, dropped them into a vial of 90 percent ethanol, and put them in the back of her Jeep Compass.
Las Vegas was just one of the cities in the western United States that Miles visited in 2012 and 2013 on spider-collecting missions. Over a few months, she amassed more than 200 of the highly venomous but reclusive arachnids from these urban environments and from surrounding rural areas, and took them back to the ...
