Talk:Rachnera Arachnera/@comment-68.99.246.78-20181215014801/@comment-4370375-20190917193626

Even Black Widow venom isn't as lethal as its reputation implies.

Like to be clear, it's not gonna be a fun experience. At best a widow bite can be incredibly painful and at worst you may be in for positively excrutiating pain, nausea, vomiting, fever, dizziness, chills, aching, breathing difficulty and skyrocketing blood pressure.

And while you should almost certainly seek medical attention if you're bitten by any Latrodectus the likelihood of death is considered so low in a healthy adult that antivenin, itself carrying a small risk of anaphylaxis, is typically reserved for only the most worrying cases and treatment will more often focus only on pain relief which you're really gonna want and could probably use a little ER visit to monitor your vitals and make sure things don't get any worse.

Assuming you get bitten out in the woods one day and can't get yourself to a hospital however, your odds of survival are still pretty high. It's only infants, the elderly and the sick who are considered at risk and even so only a handful of people have in fact ever gone on record dying from the venom of this genus.

In fact when Bogleech covered the Black Widow, Brown Recluse and Sydney Funnelweb, it was the last one who was shown to be the most dangerous do to the male having a highly aggressive response to fear unlike almost any other spider.

And even then, the number of confirmed human deaths by Atrax robustus is believed to have been thirteen before the development of antivenom while the post-antivenom kill count has been zero.