SPIDERS AND HUMANS: FEAR, FOOD, TRADE AND MISINFORMATION

SPIDERS AND HUMANS

Tales of giant spiders date back at least to ancient Greece and Arachne, the half-woman, half-spider figure in Greek mythology. J'ba Fofi is monkey-size spider said to inhabit the Congolese rainforest. Shelob was the monstrous arachnid in "The Lord of the Rings." The giant spider in Harry Potter, called Aragog, was an Acromantula who lived in the Forbidden Forest. [Source: Emma Bryce, Live Science, August 4, 2023]

According to a Greek legend spiders were creating when a seamstress named Arachne challenged the goddess Athena to a contest and then felt ashamed of her boldness and hung herself. Athena felt sorry for her and brought her back to life as a spider and made her noose into a web. Her name was also given to the scientist who study spiders (arachnologists), the fear of them (arachanaphobia) and the class of animals that includes them (Arachnida).

Only about a dozen spider species are known to be harmful to people. Matt Bertone wrote: Although they are generalist predators, apt to eat anything they can catch, spiders regularly capture nuisance pests and even disease-carrying insects — for example, mosquitoes. There’s even a species of jumping spider that prefers to eat blood-filled mosquitoes in African homes. So killing a spider doesn’t just cost the arachnid its life, it may take an important predator out of your home. [Source: Matt Bertone, Extension Associate in Entomology, North Carolina State University, The Conversation, March 12, 2022]

It’s natural to fear spiders. They have lots of legs and almost all are venomous — though the majority of species have venom too weak to cause issues in humans, if their fangs can pierce our skin at all. Even entomologists themselves can fall prey to arachnophobia. I know a few spider researchers who overcame their fear by observing and working with these fascinating creatures. If they can do it, so can you!

Spiders are not out to get you and actually prefer to avoid humans; we are much more dangerous to them than vice versa. Bites from spiders are extremely rare. Although there are a few medically important species like widow spiders and recluses, even their bites are uncommon and rarely cause serious issues.

Spider Silk and Humans

Scientist are trying to produce synthetic materials similar to spider silk for use in space ships, stealth bombers, optical instruments and other purposes. Doctors are examining spider silk to make sutures one-tenth the diameter of current sutures as well as possible artificial ligaments and tendons. Spider silk is too elastic however for bullet proof-vests. It would stop the bullet but not until it stretched to the other side of your body.

Why isn't spider silk produced like silkworm silk? The advantage of silkworm silk is that can be unraveled in one continuous strand and the spider's aggressive and cannibalistic nature makes raising them in numbers difficult.

One Canadian company spins silk similar to that produced by spiders from the milk of genetically engineered goats that look like normal goats. Spider-silk genes were implanted into goat embryos that developed into adults and passed the genetic trait onto their offspring. The advance was made possible because goat udders have similar structure to spider silk-making organs. Spider-silk proteins have also been clone into tobacco and potato plants, which secrete them on their leaves.

Misinformation About Spiders

Arachne and Athena

There is a lot of fear, misunderstandings and misinformation when it comes to spiders. In 2022, more than 60 researchers from around the world collected 5,348 news stories about spider bites, published online from 2010 through 2020 from 81 countries in 40 languages. Oliver Whang wrote in the New York Times: They read through each story, noting whether any had factual errors or emotionally fraught language. The percentage of articles they rated sensationalistic: 43 percent. The percentage of articles that had factual errors: 47 percent. “Even a very local event, like a farmer that is bitten in a small village in Australia, can quickly become a news article that is published in newspapers around the world,” said Stefano Mammola, an ecologist at the National Research Council of Italy who led the research. “I think this really speaks to the mythology and fascination that people have with spiders, that comes with fear,” Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at McGill University, said. “And the lack of good information around them.” [Source: Oliver Whang, New York TimesAugust 26, 2022]

To measure the sensationalism of a story, the group looked for frequent use of emotional words, including “devil,” “killer,” “nasty,” “nightmare” and “terror.” They then counted the errors in the story. Were people calling spiders insects? (They’re arachnids.) Were they exaggerating the danger of a particular spider? Did they get basic spider anatomy wrong? Many of the results, while stark, didn’t shock most of the scientists, who had grown accustomed to this kind of spider news. Whether the widespread fear of spiders came before arachnid sensationalism, or vice versa, the two undoubtedly feed off each other. “Given certain topics, we’d naturally be prone to sensationalism,” Mammola said.

Eating Spiders

Spiders are eaten in many places. It has been said that Nephilia spider tastes like a potato. Skoeun, a town near Phnom Penh, is famous for its spider brochettes. The mildly-toxic two-inch- long spiders are caught in the nearby forests, dipped in flour and powered peanuts and fried. Sold for about 20 cents a stick, they are served in restaurants and hawked from trays to passing motorists. One customer at a spider restaurant told the Phnom Penh Post. "It's not as tasty as cricket, but it could be good if you eat it with wine." Another said, "It's nice, it tastes good. They clean the stomach.”

Heidi Fuller-Love wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Skun is home to Cambodia's largest concentration of tarantulas. Tthe market stands were piled high with fried crickets, grilled locusts and braised a-pings, as the beleaguered arachnids are known locally. All around me school kids and old women were buying the spiders. They are black, hairy, as big as a hand and, at 50 cents each, didn't come cheap. "We fry them to destroy the poison, then dip them in garlic and salt," a vendor said.[Source: Heidi Fuller-Love, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2011 ^^^]

“Steeling myself for the big one, I browsed the stands, sampling crickets (bland and crunchy) and locusts (meaty and the legs stick between the teeth) before buying a bag of tarantulas. Shutting my eyes, I dipped my hand in the bag, pulled off a leg and nibbled. Surprisingly, once the initial revulsion wore off, the taste was not so bad. The texture of the a-ping was rough and crispy like a pork crackling, but inside it was tender and fatty and tasted a bit like cod. "The head is the best bit," said an old woman, with half a spider in her hand, half in her mouth. I decided to take her word for it and offered her the rest of my bag. She accepted gratefully and made short shrift of the three arachnids inside. ^^^

Studying Spiders

Spiderlogist capture their specimens with a plastic straw-like tube. When the scientist see a spider, he or she sucks on the straw. A "strategically placed nylon swatch" captures the prey and keeps it from zipping down the scientists's throat. Corn starch is sprayed onto webs so that scientist can observe their structure and shape with breaking the threads.

SpiderPharm is a company that raises black widows brown recluses, tarantulas and other poisonous spiders for their venom. Roderick MacKinnon, the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry, uses tarantula and scorpion venom to study potassium ion channels in cells.

Spider expert Jonathon Coddington works at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Spider expert Fritz Vollrath occasionally takes spiders to a sychotron in Grenoble, France and places the spider on a little platform and hooks its thread to tiny reels that pull the thread out of the spiders body .at different speeds. The synchoton produces high energy X-rays that can be analyzed to give insights into how the silk and silk making glands respond to different stimuli.

Theatened Spiders and the Arachnid Trade

Describing a stroll through Costa Rica’s Area de Conservacion Guanacaste rainforest, evolutionary ecologist Daniel Janzen in 2019 wrote: “Gone are the spiderwebs that decades back entangled those leaves. Gone is the nighttime sparkle in the leaves reflected from thousands of lycosid spider eyes.” [Source Julia Janicki, Gloria Dickie, Simon Scarr and Jitesh Chowdhury, Reuters. December 6, 2022]

Otherwise it is difficult to gauge how threatened spiders and arachnids are because there is relatively little research on the subject. In a paper published in Communications Biology in May 2022, a team led by Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, addressed the largely unregulated trade of arachnids by analyzing the online sales listings of more than 1,200 species of spiders, scorpions and other arachnids. Just two percent of them are subject to international trade regulations, the researchers said. “Arachnids are being massively traded,” Hughes said. “And it seems to be going completely under the radar.” To learn about the scale of the global arachnid trade, the authors of the paper used a handful of search terms — “spider,” “scorpion,” “arachnid” — in nine languages to identify websites that might be selling the animals.

Emily Anthes wrote in the New York Times: Many organisms in the arachnid marketplace appear to have been caught in the wild rather than bred in captivity, the study found, and the ecological impact of their harvest remains unknown. “They’re just being removed willy-nilly in large numbers,” said Anne Danielson-Francois, an arachnologist and behavioral ecologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who was not involved in the new research. She added, “They’re not this unlimited resource.” [Source: Emily Anthes, New York Times May 22, 2022]

There’s a large and growing demand for invertebrates, experts said, and arachnids make popular pets. They are a cinch to ship — “You can literally mail an envelope of little spiderlings” Hughes said — and many species are relatively easy to care for. “They don’t bark, they don’t need to go for walks — you can set up a simple arachnid in a 5-gallon tank on your shelf,” said Ernest Cooper, an independent wildlife-trade expert in Canada. “They have fascinating behaviors. Some have bright colors.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Mostly National Geographic articles. Also David Attenborough books, Livescience, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Natural History magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, and various books and other publications.

Last updated August 2025