Black widow comes home for the holidays
By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Staff Writer
Janice Okubo almost had an uninvited guest at her Thanksgiving dinner.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
Okubo went shopping Thanksgiving morning at the Hawai'i Kai Safeway, and among the items she purchased was a bunch of grapes.
Janice Okubo discovered this spider, with the red hourglass marking of a black widow on its belly, in a bunch of grapes she bought yesterday at the Hawai'i Kai Safeway store.
When she took them out of the package to wash them, she saw what she described as a "black bug" in the middle of the bunch. Just the night before, she had seen a report on CNN about people on the Mainland finding black widow spiders in red grapes.
That got her thinking. She immediately called her husband over.
"He washed it into the colander and got it into the jar," Okubo said. "When we checked it, it had the red hourglass shape on the stomach, then we checked on the Internet to make sure."
It was a little spider, maybe less than half an inch from one leg to the other, but it was alive.
Okubo, who happens to be communications director for the state Department of Health, planned to take the spider into her office's Vector Control branch today to have an entomologist take a look at it.
In the meantime, she thought she should let people know to be careful.
"It's important to remind people to always wash their fruits because you don't know what you're going to find in there," she said. "As it happened, it was under running water. If I had been handling it, it might have crawled on me or something."
Okubo called Safeway to tell them what happened. Safeway Hawai'i Kai management couldn't answer questions from the media and referred inquiries to their corporate offices, which were closed for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Black widow spiders are found in Hawai'i, usually in the drier regions of the islands. The venom from a black widow is very toxic, though rarely fatal to humans, according to the book "What Bit Me?" by Gordon Nishida and Joann Tenorio.
As for the grapes, Okubo said, "There was a bunch that had webbing inside of it. I threw that part away."
The rest, she said with a laugh, she was planning to serve at Thanksgiving dinner. At the very least, it would be a good conversation piece.
Contact Lee Cataluna at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.
