The Black Widow Blues

So I recently had the opportunity to get back in the field for work. Yippeee!! I was so happy to be out and about and not staring at the gray walls of my cubicle that it really didn't matter to me what I was actually doing in the field. I was happy with whatever was thrown my way. And boy was this an "interesting" site. It's a contaminated site up in Panama City on which we were sampling groundwater for a list of parameters including VOCs, SVOCs, lead, TRPHs, and PCBs. We had twenty wells to sample for groundwater level. Below is a picture of what a well casing looks like. The well is the white PVC pipe with a cap on the top to keep things from falling into it. And the rusty metal thing around it is a box to keep the well protected and locked if you so choose. Since this site is only sampled once or twice a year, some of the local creatures have taken up residence in the wells. I was excited when I opened this well and found some really cool egg sacs...

I was excited when I opened this well and found some really cool egg sacs...
Here's a blow up of some of the ones inside the casing lid. There were probably about 15 of these spacey looking sacs, so I called over my coworker and asked her to come take a look at them. Good thing I did! She identified them as Black Widow spider eggs...YIKES! So then we started looking for Mama...we found her in the corner, somewhat scared, but still very dangerous looking all decked out with her red hour-glass marking on her underside. I didn't get a picture of her, but she looked like one of those sweet old ladies with a dark past! And of course I didn't want to kill her, so my coworker kept an eye on her while I reached my hand down into the well to take the cap off...no bites!Here is a picture of what the actual Black Widow spider looks like. Here are a couple more. And according to this site, even the egg sacs contain poison! Wow, glad I didn't take a specimen!

Oh, and we also found a dead scorpion in another well and a very large bee's nest in another. I'm not sure what kind of bees they were, but they looked much larger to me than a normal honey bee. I'm hoping they weren't the Africanized Honey Bees (aka African killer bees which established in Florida around 2005)! Can you tell the difference? Either way, we didn't get stung, but we did have to kill them to get to the well...sorry bees!