BLACK WIDOW SPIDER-DANGER!

The garbled sentence structure of Conklin's opening author's note is a deterrent; thereafter her prose is simple and straightforward but toneless--as she observes the fly-trapping, molting, mating, and egg-sac building of one representative black widow. Once the eggs hatch, ""the lives of the spiderlings were in danger at once. . . . The black widow mother that had guarded her egg sac so carefully was also eating her young ones""--startling enough behavior to rate some sort of comment, but Conklin simply goes on with the footage. Morrill's sketchy drawings are no match, though, for a zoom lens. Workaday.