Teemo is always a legitimate prey.

I’m from Australia and I always thought it was on the top. Turns out our black widow, affectionately known as a redback, has the marking on top. Not sure if the two are actually related, though.

Black widows are so common where I am, I don’t even need to see that hourglass to know it’s one. I can even identify males, which don’t look very similar to the iconic females.

They also do sometimes have red markings on their back. Just do an image search for black widows; many of them have a whole band of red that goes from the belly up the back. Can’t say I’ve seen any like that IRL, though.

Yeah when I looked them up via image search in case I might be wrong, and there were occasional depictions with the hourglass on top but they seemed to be photoshopped images or illustrations that would be used for a “5 ways to kill these pests!!” clickbait websites.

In most cases it probably is from a lack of real world exposure to the spiders in question. They were pretty common where I grew up and I was taught to be on the lookout for the black shiny abdomen because you can’t always see the hourglass.

I mean, he did. Such poison damage is a bit similar to bad chemical or fire damage, except it often affects deeper tissue stronger and can “hide” behind a relatively healthy surface skin.

The damaged deep tissue has died and turned to slush from the poison, which the body needs to dispose of and then rebuild from scratch. However, with large damage in the deep tissue, which is where skin repair should originate from, this is often impossible to achieve perfectly. So you often get enclosed pockets of “weird/wrong” tissue that has no proper drainage to the outside or inside to the lymphatic system. So occasionally, bacteria or viruses crawl in and fester. The bad circulation due to the previous damage means the immune system has a hard time fighting it, which usually leads to it cordoning off the area, forming a so called abscess. If this abscess can then be properly drained to the surface and sterilized(!), this can keep it calm for very long times and is comparably easy to manage and monitor.

And there is no good alternative. You can try and remove all the damaged tissue, which has the unpleasant side effect of having the surgeons carve a huge hole in you. Which the body again will have to try and repair, including massive scarification, possible los if function is nerves and/or muscle tissue is lost and a very high risk of formation of more abscess-prone internal scar tissue. If there’s no way to deal with the occasional infections in a hygienic manner, there’s a high risk of abscesses draining internally sooner or later. This almost always leads to intense sepsis, which is very often lethal after mere days.

Which is why the usual alternative to large-scale deep tissue damage is called amputation, even today and with all the crazy medical advances we have.