I'm a little strange. I love spiders.
Black widows, in particular, are kind of elegant.
So tonight I was reading my very densely packed textbook on psychopharm and there is an entire chapter devoted to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh). Turns out ACh has a lot to do with muscular activity, and if a little critter gets bitten by a black widow spider, a toxin contained in the widow's venom actually causes a huge release of ACh into the peripheral nervous system. Anytime ACh gets out of balance with DA (dopamine), chaos will ensue and your body will experience paralysis, or convulsions, sweating, uncontrollable bowel movements, etc.
But we, as humans, don't generally experience this when we're bitten by black widows. What really got me, in reading all of this tonight, was the sentence that said, "Ounce for ounce, black widow venom is 15 times more toxic than prairie rattlesnake venom" (Meyer and Quenzer, 2013, p. 187).
It's just that the spider is so small that it can't have a large effect on a human. Lucky us, right?
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