Aug 20, 2020 — Science fiction movies aside, most spiders pose no threat to humans. Their venom may be fatal to small insects, but few species are powerful enough to hurt something human-sized and most are not equipped to penetrate our skin. Most spiders are not even aware that we are there.
Jumping spider: too many eyes, too many legs, too much hair, startlingly good jumpers - eek-worthy but basically harmless. Be glad they're not the size of dinner plates. Photo of the Day archive: Jenn Kulo, Saranac Lake, NY
That being said, they can be pretty scary, and are best left alone. Martha Foley and Curt Stager tamp down the arachnophobia.
MARTHA FOLEY: So, let’s talk about spiders. Do all spiders bite people? Given the opportunity?
CURT STAGER: Uh, yeah, I don’t think spiders go about their lives dreaming of the opportunity to bite a human. It might even be hard to believe, you know, when you see these house spiders around, like we have these little brown ones you swear look like a brown recluse every time you see them, which could be a danger to a person. But really for most of them, they don’t even know you’re there. We think they must know because it’s our house or because we’re so big. But really, they’re oblivious, and any reason why a spider might bite something would be for protection or to eat.
And the venom inside a spider's - little chelicerae, you call them, instead of jaws - is designed to subdue insects, basically. So there wouldn’t be any reason why it would be able to hurt a person, necessarily. So it’s pretty rare to have a spider you’d need to worry about.
FOLEY: So, do they all have a venom though? That’s how they kill what they’re eating.
STAGER: Yeah, typically there’d be some kind of a venom and little meat tenderizer enzymes in there, too.
FOLEY: So, I’ve got to ask about - because there’s some spiders that we see all the time - we’re used to the little spiders in the house. I have some little tiny spiders that I like that hang on the light in the bathroom, and they catch mosquitoes. And I like that spider; that spider’s on my side. And we have big dock spiders, those big, hairy, very noticeable when they all of a sudden appear under a boat cushion or something like that. Do they bite people? Are they – they’re big and kind of scary looking.
STAGER: Yeah, um, I’m always cautious about saying how dangerous a spider is. The official story I hear from specialists – arachnologists who study arachnids like spiders – will tell you it’s very hard to identify them, that’s one thing, you can’t just tell by the markings. The other one is they say, most of them can’t bite you if they wanted to; it’s too hard to get through your skin. They don’t have jaws, really, they have these pokey things, so, you know if you’re not an insect. But, I have seen spiders that made me not want to get near them, and sometimes they’d be aggressive, too. I saw a dock spider once, we were moving a dock in to set it up, and when we picked the old dock off the ground, there was one of those big, what we call dock spiders under it too, and it jumped at one of us.
FOLEY: No! It didn’t jump at anybody – don’t say that!
STAGER: Well, it was jumping in our direction. So, we figured, ‘I don’t want to find out if it could bite me if it wanted to.’
FOLEY: I get that, I get that. And from what you say, if it’s so hard to identify the actual kind of spider, there are a lot of biggish spiders, but the dock spiders are notable just for their size. They can be just huge.
STAGER: There are hundreds of species, so we use common terms like dock spider, or if you see a big hairy one you call it a "wolf spider."
FOLEY: Oh, a jumping spider.
STAGER: Yeah, well, actually I think that might actually be an easy one, those little tiny ones that look like a miniature Jeep, and they jump around at you and stuff. So, I think those actually are called jumping spiders. But, it’s really hard to tell the species. Not just, oh, you open a field guide and it’s got these markings, because a lot of them share those. And there are many many species that are not in your field guide. So really the pros, the arachnologists, will tell you you’ve got to look under a microscope and count the eyes, count the bristles, the spinnerets, where they make their web and things like that. So we use the folklore terms. And then just basically stay out of their way, and they’ll do what they do, and they’ll leave us alone, too.
FOLEY: And I like the ones that catch my mosquitoes. My friends, the spiders.
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August 20, 2020 at 11:01AM
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Spiders: often eek-worthy, but mostly not a danger - North Country Public Radio
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