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 ...

Male and female black widow spiders exhibit striking differences. Females are larger, with glossy black bodies and a red hourglass marking, while males are smaller and drabber. Females are known ...

Female black widow spiders are well known for their red hourglass, found underneath their abdomens, while brown recluses do .

In the past couple decades, researchers have noticed black widow spiders (adult female shown at right) commonly being displaced by the brown widow (adult female at left), a fellow species in 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 ...