RSS

Tag Archives: spiders

Once Bitten, Twice Defiant (but Probably Not Bitten)

Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?

I like to say I’m self-taught, but at least I’m taught. We’ve all heard that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” but you know what’s worse? A total lack of knowledge. Fear the void. Ignorance is not bliss. It’s fear and confusion.

Writing about spiders is fun! There are always lots of myths, misunderstandings, misreportings, and mirth. There are medical realities unknown even to the well-informed. There are arcane and bizarre biological facts. There are opportunities for pleasant anthropomorphism: Jumping spiders dance and they look like kittens! Baby spiders fly! Since few people know anything at all about spiders, a modest amount of research always digs up new and surprising things.

But if the Internet has taught us anything (has it? discuss), it’s that “a modest amount of research” will be not only opposed, but often emotionally and even angrily opposed, by some people who haven’t done any research. Once in a while the arguing doesn’t stray too far from rational turf, even if it’s loud. But in the spider realm, lots of what people say on social media and in news articles takes that weird turn. Stubborn, accusing, insulting. Facts don’t seem to matter. That’s because it’s all about beliefs.

Now I’m in for it. What puts “spider beliefs” in the same category as political, religious, or ideological delusions convictions? I can’t say with authority, having successfully avoided philosophy and psychology for many years. So I’ll just guess.

Years ago, I read everything I could find about urban legends. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand (still with us at 90!) was my favorite author. It was great silly fun to see him take colorful stories I’d been told—you were, too—by friends of friends and show them to be just campfire tales. The subtext made this phenomenon even more interesting. People retold those legends, and swore by them, not just for entertainment: they were coded warnings. Urban legends worked their magic when they took something scary and unexplainable—such as a random murder, a ghost story, an uninvited spider—and built it into a tasty, shareable anecdote. And then they told you what to do about it: don’t park in isolated places, do avoid weird strangers, say your prayers, fear nature, tell a friend, trust your gut!

In other words, believe your lyin’ eyes.

The stronger the danger, the stronger the belief. Teenagers who sneak off to dark places really do get murdered now and then. Nature really is out to get you. Cast a skeptical eye upon weird strangers and you might avoid getting robbed or, I don’t know, drugged and dragged into a white van. (Then again, if the weird stranger is actually a hitchhiking Seraph who fingers his flaming sword while he solemnly announces “the Apocalypse is coming” right before vanishing, don’t be skeptical.)

Almost all spiders pose no danger at all in the ordinary run of things, but people never learned that. They’re untaught yet primed to be suspicious. Through a combination of passed-along phobias and an eerily durable sense of disgust provoked by hairiness, legginess, and facelessness, spider anxiety settles into many people’s mindset before they’re even aware of it, and good luck dislodging it. The gut warns us where the brain doesn’t: ignoring the spider menace might bring illness, scars, death!

But even that’s not enough to firm up a spider phobia. Sealing the deal demands an alarming experience; this too is right out of the urban-legends playbook. Either personal (“I was bitten by an invisible spider” or, less often, “I found a spider and it must have bitten me, because what else?”) or very close to personal: “My neighbor’s uncle was bitten by a spider—no, he never saw it, he was just waking up—and somebody identified it as a brown recluse, and he was seriously sick for a long time and are you calling me a liar?”

That last sentence is practically the script for online spider comments. The “somebody” who identified a nonnative (usually invisible) spider is always nonrecoverable. Was it a doctor? Pest control guy? College professor who knows some Latin? Dear old Dad? We’ll never know. That part of the story is lost to time, just like the dead brown spider (if any), but the scary experience lives on.

You know the thing about extraordinary claims. They require extraordinary evidence. And blaming a sore on a spider that you never saw, that doesn’t cause sores, that’s never been seen in your town, and that doesn’t live within a thousand miles of you all sounds pretty extraordinary-claim-y, right? Just as it would be extraordinary if your average Joseph could identify a spider—by species, no less—that he never even saw. That’s not even guesswork. That’s miraculous.

Michael Shermer already has the best book title of this genre: “Why People Believe Weird Things.” It’s worth a read, especially for the way it shows how common, and how human, it is to be fooled. In the case of spiders, we can give this brief answer to Shermer’s title: “Because they’re scary and someone got hurt. By something.” That’s too short for a dissertation (I’ll do better next time, Professor Brunvand) but good enough, I think, for Facebook and Nextdoor.

 
Comments Off on Once Bitten, Twice Defiant (but Probably Not Bitten)

Posted by on March 1, 2024 in Envenomation, Loxosceles (recluses), Myths and Calumnies

 

Tags: , ,

Meet the Spider: Cheiracanthium

Little night stalker has a reputation worse than its bite

You’ve met this spider before. I say that with great confidence. Members of the genus Cheiracanthium are found worldwide and, far from being reclusive, are often out and about. We encounter two species: C. inclusum (native to the Americas) and C. mildei (a sneaky import). You find the yellow sac spider in houses and in foliage, prowling and patrolling, hunting for food. When it’s resting in a house during the day, it’s likely to be snoozing in an elongated sleeping sac tucked into a corner where a wall meets the ceiling, or two walls meet. That’s the “sac” part of the common name. It also favors rolled-up leaves and ground debris, like bark.

HERE WE GLOW: A Cheiracanthium spider photographed in Guelph, Ontario. Note the extra-long first pair of legs, which help with identification. (Ryan Hodnett—Creative Commons)

The yellow is variable: it can be golden, brownish, lemony, or even greenish. In our place we call it the “glow in the dark spider” not because it has such a superpower but because the lemon chiffon color reminds us of toys or stickers that shine when the lights go out. And because it’s a creature of the night.

Cheiracanthium is worth talking about not only because it’s widely encountered but because it has a reputation. It can bite people, and does—but of course spider panic kicks in when people learn of this fact, and the yellow sac spider gets saddled with all those ghastly rumors about unhealing sores and swelling, with gross overkill pictures delivered by Dr. Internet. In truth, the bites start with a sting and turn into redness and itching. That’s pretty much it, not that it sounds like fun.

WAITING FOR DARK: A Cheiracanthium inclusum strikes a typical outdoors pose. The yellow sac spider is at home indoors and out, wherever there are bugs to be found. (Cletus Lee—Creative Commons)

Can’t a pest just be a pest? That’s not just my assessment, by the way. That’s the word the viniculture people apply to the Cheiracanthium spiders that loiter in the vineyards and fields of my fair state, stickying up the vines with their silken retreats and occasionally nipping fieldhands. Actually, it’s a pest that eats other pests, which is considered a plus if you’re trying to cut down on the agricultural pesticides.

I bet a lot of those spiders end up in the crush come harvest time. But c’mon, you asked for organic! It wouldn’t be the first exotic undertone in your fancy, fancy yellow wine.

This is a spider that’s maybe harder to love than others. But hear me out.

The estimable Spider Club of Southern Africa, my chums in the Southern Hemisphere, posted not long ago on their Facebook page: “The sac spider, yellow sac spider or house sac spider, has been declared ‘not guilty’!” What was the alleged crime? Necrotic wounds. Cheiracanthium spiders in South Africa had been accused, on disputed evidence, of causing the same kind of serious sores of which brown recluses are capable. More:

The media got hold of this research, it was repeated many times in both scientific and popular literature without rigorous investigation and a legend was born. Recent research, however, has concluded that their venom does not contain the compound that causes necrosis and that this reputation is undeserved. House sac spiders are no more or less dangerous to humans than any other spider and like all spiders they try their best to avoid contact with us. (Dangerous Spiders in South Africa, by Astri Leroy, revised 2015)

Envenomation is a complex phenomenon. To some wildlife experts in South Africa, for instance, Cheiracanthium is still not in the clear. The African Snake Bite Institute expresses a cautious view that the local species, C. furculatum, might indeed cause serious problems, although it concedes most bites are still little more than nuisances. Some components of its venom call for further study. Among other variables, the institute says that “scratching may introduce bacteria from the hands/nails of the victim to the wound.” And it’s undisputed that these bites tend to be itchy.

Let’s pause there for a moment. The yellow sac spider doesn’t stand in the dock alone. There’s broad research trying to pin down whether, and when, an otherwise insignificant spider bite might cause health problems simply by breaking the skin. Necrotic wounds and the bacterial skin infection known as cellulitis, for instance: those are very likely to be caused by staph bacteria, which live on normal human skin and in the environment. And what can break the skin? Anything pointy or scrape-y. Not just invertebrate mouthparts but spines, thorns, nettles, wood splinters, rusty tools, dog toenails, dirty fingernails.

So why is a skin wound from unknown causes instantly called a “spider bite” anyway? Too often, even experienced medical personnel will shrug that it’s a spider bite because it looks like a spider bite. Notice how very often the news articles claiming to report on a ghastly spider bite add, “The victim never actually saw the spider that bit him.” Both of these statements are beliefs, not evidence-based conclusions. That’s why experts have a general rule that if a spider was not seen in the act of biting, and then identified by a spider expert, it’s unwarranted to call something a spider bite. And you really don’t want to call something a “brown recluse bite” if you live thousands of miles away from any and all brown recluses. But oh, people do.

And it’s not just idle chatter. Crying “spider bite” is a potentially dangerous tic if it leads a doctor down a blind alley trying to fight a nonexistent venom when he or she should be fighting an infection. And it sows confusion if it makes everyone in your social media circle afraid of something that doesn’t happen. (Yes, fifty million British tabloid readers can be wrong.) As I’ve mentioned before, arachnophobia can kill: consider the person in the car you smash into while flailing around at a harmless spider, or the burn victims who tried to KILL IT WITH FIRE.

And don’t forget stress. If you spend your life in fear of small animals that are always part of your environment, that just has to shorten your life, not kidding.

SACKED: “Well, I’m off to disable somebody’s Toyota. Those emissions-control hoses aren’t going to clog themselves.(Joseph Berger—Bugwood.org.)

Yellow sac spiders may not be cuddly, but that’s no reason to make them monsters. Sober scientific folks are still looking into cases of envenomation of our sallow friend, but the evidence on balance is that bites, when they happen at all, are a nuisance.

Speaking of nuisances, these vagabonds do clog up certain vital parts of cars with their sticky little webs. Cars are a great place to lay low during the day. No worries, this too shall pass. Soon we’ll all be driving electric Futuremobiles without a lot of important hoses and tubes under the hood. But there still might be a glow-in-the-dark spider roaming your electric car’s glowing dashboard. Just wave as it goes by.

 
Comments Off on Meet the Spider: Cheiracanthium

Posted by on November 18, 2021 in Cheiracanthium (sac spiders), Envenomation

 

Tags: , ,