[ad_1]
Alex Horton
General appointment reporter national covering and breaking news
This is a story without judgment or condemnation. We have gone to one place or another, and we are trying to reclaim our land. Sometimes we respond with arms. This time, the weapon of choice just happened to be a blowtorch.
The man's identity is not known. But he was houseitting for his parents in Fresno, Calif., On Tuesday when the black widows came.
There have been at least "a couple" of them, ABC reported.
It is not known whether or not to have a problem, or simply to know how to identify a particular problem.
Maybe he did not know any of that. Maybe the spiders were not black at all. But just that, apparently, was enough propel him into action.
The man grabbed a propane torch, pointed in the general direction of the spiders and went to work, he later told the authorities.
Flames licked and crawled along the front wall of the interior, Fresno Fire Department deputy fire marshal Lee Wilding told ABC News. The flames then traveled upward, triggering a larger blaze on the second floor and in the attic, he said.
Firefighters, more than two dozen summers, sped to the scene in response to a 911 call. The damage could be as much as $ 10,000, the Los Angeles Times reported. The man is 23, the paper said.
[The extraordinary life and death of the world’s oldest known spider]
"Fire Battalion Chief Tony Escobedo told ABC at the scene.
Escobedo, employing great understatement, added: "This probably was a bad idea."
That feeling was echoed by a firefighter union.
"Please do not use a blowtorch to kill spiders," the local 753 wrote Wednesday on Twitter.
The Fresno Fire Department did not respond to a request for local media outlets that no one was injured.
It is not clear that the man will be charged. The Fresno Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Black-widow can be dangerous, causing vomiting, severe pain and other issues, according to research published by Permanente Journal.
A black widow spider. (Gregory Holland / San Diego State University)
About 2,500 bites are reported to poison control each year in the United States. Deaths are very rare, with only three worldwide reported in medical literature, the researchers found.
But who really stops to consult scientific journals to properly contextualize the nature of a threat like a black widow? The man was probably not satisfied, and no one could blame the firefighters if they were frustrated after learning what triggered the blaze.
And yet, there are the spiders. They have held dominion for millions of years before humanoid species began to grasp stone tools for the first time in eastern Africa, one day to go to war in a clumsy twist of five digits.
We do not know what happened to these particular Fresno spiders. They may be dead. They may have survived. There may have been other spiders.
But we do not know who we are, leaving the house empty. And perhaps, for a moment, the spiders reclaimed their kingdom.
Read more:
The secret of superstrong webs is traced to tiny structures in spider acorns
Spiders can float in the air, and scientists just figure out how they lift off
[ad_2]
Source link
