A photo of the eight-legged critter that Calvin Bruneau discovered after a grocery shopping trip. (Amanda Bruneau/Facebook)

By Keenan Sorokan

Warman man brings home black widow spider after grocery shopping trip

Nov 9, 2019 | 10:13 AM

Calvin Bruneau arrived home from a grocery shopping trip with a little more than he asked for last week.

Bruneau emptied his groceries to find a black widow spider at his Warman house after shopping at the north Costco in Saskatoon last Saturday.

“We started unpacking and we were halfway through getting the groceries out the box and I noticed a big black spider crawled out of the corner of the box,” Bruneau said.

The spider crawled out of a produce box Bruneau loaded his groceries in at the self-checkout kiosk.

Taking home a spider — when he didn’t purchase any produce himself — was a shock.

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“We’ve found all kind of spiders that have hitchhiked from camping, but grocery shopping — no, I didn’t expect that,” he said.

Rather than squashing the insect, Bruneau put the spider in a container and quickly got a hold of a local spider enthusiast to take care of it.

While black widow spider bites can be dangerous, they aren’t considered lethal since the development of antivenom. Any bites should still be looked at by a medical professional.

“I didn’t see one like it before. Until we had him in the container, I got a good look at him and I noticed the red hourglass on his belly. I figured that’s a black widow.” Bruneau said.

His next action was to take pictures of the insect, call Costco and tell a manger what had happened.

While Bruneau wasn’t adversely affected by the critter, his wife Amanda wanted to be nowhere near the spider or anything that came back from Costco.

“I took the box outside, knocked it around, shook it, checked all the corners. We didn’t want anymore hidden treasures,” Bruneau said. “I did go out to the truck and vacuum it — wife’s orders.”