A shopper came face to face with a killer spider when it fell out of a bag of grapes she had bought from a supermarket.

Denise Kirkham was stunned to see the deadly female black widow spider in the grapes she had bought from Tesco's internet site a week earlier.

Mrs Kirkham, of Bateman Court, Furnace Green, Crawley, said: "The spider was down inside the packet and it fell out. I had an inkling about what it was because I had seen reports in the newspapers.

"As it fell out, it just moved a leg. I wasn't sure if it was dead but it didn't move after that and then I just stuck it in a jar."

The 55-year-old grandmother said she had not been scared because she had worked with all sorts of animals, including snakes, at Tilgate Park Nature Centre.

But she was grateful it had not been her seven-year-old granddaughter who had opened the packet.

The spider has been sent to the Natural History Museum's entomology department, where experts confirmed it was a black widow spider with its distinctive red belly. They said they had seen several in recent weeks after they had been found in bunches of grapes.

Insect expert Dr Gerald Legg, of the Booth Museum, Brighton, said: "The likelihood of it killing you is not high unless you are particularly sensitive to it."

Black widows do not usually survive in cooler climates.

A spokesman for Tesco revealed it was the sixth black widow scare the supermarket chain had received recently.

It had since changed suppliers because the Californian growing season had ended and was now getting grapes from South America and South Africa.