Citizen scientists show Black Widows creeping north in Canada

To humans, 31 miles may not seem like a very long distance to travel, but for a spider, it’s a long, long way to go. Emily Chung at the CBC reports on a new study that shows that since the 1960s, the northern black widow spider, Latrodectus variolus, has crawled that much further into Canada and may continue skittering northward as the climate changes. Thanks to lead author Yifu Wang of McGill University and her team’s efforts to use citizen-scientist data to create updated range maps of the much-feared species, we now know the black widow has moved into new territory.

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