I'll see your Black Widow Spider, and raise you one nasty Momma bark scorpion, with her brood on her back!
This one isn't my photo--credit goes to Joel Sartore, the brilliant National Geographic photographer responsible for the Photo Ark project, an attempt to document as many of the earth's creatures as possible, before they disappear.
I used to hunt Black Widows at night, at my house in Phoenix, with a flashlight in one hand, and a fly swatter in the other. They build crappy little webs, low to the ground, around house foundations and the like, and they'll eat just about anything that gets caught in it. The ladies produce a big egg sack, and if you don't destroy them before they hatch, you'll have a hundred baby black widows crawling all over the place.
We have scorpions here as well. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to catch them and put them in jars. There was a professor at ASU, a Dr. Stahnke, who needed scorpions for his research into their venom, and he'd pay us two bits apiece for as many as we could bring him. (In case you weren't a kid back in the '50's, at that time, two bits--25 cents--was a lot! Enough to buy you two comic books and a candy bar!) I have to wonder what the Professor would have paid for this lovely specimen? How could you even count those things?
Rick