Grapes + Spider = EWWWW!

Fellow parents, beware.  Actually, people in general- beware of your grocery store produce and the things that lurk unseen.

I should back up.  I shop at Costco (love Costco btw).  Pretty much buy all our groceries there – convenience, quality, price… ya know?  Anyway.  Picked up some grapes last weekend.  They sat in our fridge all week.

Today, my little sister who was over finally washed them and set them out for the kiddos.  She noticed lots of cobwebs in the grapes; but just wiped them off.

Enter my adorable 3 year old little punk who loves grapes … he climbs up to the counter and starts munching.  Suddenly we notice something crawling in his bowl.  Not just any ‘something’.  It’s a spider, that looks like this:

It bears the tell-tale markings of a brown widow.  Stripes on its back, hourglass on abdomen, all the typical signs.

I contacted Jeff Hahn, an entomologist with the U of M, who confirmed (by looking at pictures) that it is a brown widow spider.

EWWWWW.

I am so grossed out.

Here’s what a brown widow is capable of:

“The pain might be severe. Professor Jerome Goddard and colleagues, in a report on a rare case of a serious brown widow spider bite published in the 2008 Southern Medical Journal, noted that 10 minutes after being bitten, a 20-year-old man arrived at the hospital with pain, swelling and redness at the site of the bite. The patient, who was bitten in the neck, compared the pain of the bite with being hit with something “like a sledgehammer.”

Source: LiveStrong.com

The bites also cause severe muscle cramps, pain, redness, swelling, intense headaches, and a bunch of possible other horrid side effects.

I’m soooo glad the little tyke didn’t get bit, or worse yet, eat the spider.

———-

We called Costco in Maple Grove.  They were great; they’re going to refund us the cost of the grapes and ‘get us some free product’.  The store manager said  the grapes came from California and that the St. Louis Park store recently had a similar a similar issue (a spider was found in their grapes).

Anyway, if you’re a spider person, you may find these articles interesting.  They’re about other people who have also found venomous, highly toxic arachnids in their food.

Black Widow Spider Found in Grapes by Toronto Man

Woman Sees Spider After Eating Grapes (This is about another Minnesota lady).