Ep 219 The Brown Recluse: Fearsome foe or slandered spider?

Few spiders hold the dubious honor of name recognition among the general public. Most that do, like black widows, Australian funnel-web, the Goliath birdeater, are renowned not for their cute colors or weaving skills but for being fearsome, dangerous predators. The brown recluse is no exception. A bite from one of these arachnids can send someone to the hospital with a painful necrotizing wound and weeks of recovery. But do these spiders actually deserve all the hatred they get? In this week’s episode, we argue no. Breaking down not just the bite of thebrown recluse but also its behaviors, its distribution, and its lore, we present a more complete picture of this vilified arachnid. Tune in for the low down on this shy spider. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAu See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This is Exactly Right.

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  Miss C.S., age 24, entered the hospital because of a spider bite on the ulnar side of the right elbow and a rash over the entire body, with the exception of the face. She stated that while riding in an automobile, November 5, 1928, she suddenly felt a sticking sensation on her right elbow. She removed her coat, ran her hand into the sleeve, and withdrew a small object which dropped to the floor of the car and which, when recovered, was found to be a rather small, tan spider. Her arm began to pain at once, the pain becoming progressively worse. On returning home an hour later, she examined her arm and found a dark red spot surrounded by an area of pallor. She slept well until 3:00 a.m. without a sedative,

• 2:28Speaker 05

  when she awakened with pain in her right arm and a generalized rash, which was most pronounced on the abdomen and back. Her arm, at this time, was aching and had swollen somewhat. The next day, the swelling was very pronounced. Four days later, the rash seemed to be fading, but the following day, it was as bad as before. Before entering the hospital, the patient had a rapid pulse, but her temperature reaction was mild, never much over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. She entered the hospital five days after having been bitten. The patient was anxious and restless. The arms, legs, abdomen, and chest were covered with a scarletina form rash with a few small pustules on the legs. On the inner surface of the right elbow was found a small reddened area with a yellow center resembling a small pustule.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  The area around the elbow was swollen and tender. The entire abrasion was not more than 1/4 inch in diameter. The treatment was essentially palliative, consisting of sedatives internally and starch and sodium bicarbonate baths. A solution of 0.5% lead acetate was used in wet packs applied to the area of the bite. The spider was identified by Professor C.R. Crosby of Cornell University as a specimen of Laxocellus reffessans, a species usually found in Texas, Florida, Mexico, Costa Rica, Europe, and Japan. As yet, little reference has been made in the literature regarding its toxicity. So far as my search of the literature enables me to judge, no case of poisoning from its bite has been reported from this region.

• 4:38Speaker 07

  Well, well, well.

• 4:40Speaker 05

  Well, well, well.

• 4:42Speaker 07

  How about it?

• 4:44Speaker 05

  How about that, Erin?

• 4:46Speaker 07

  That was excerpted from a paper in 1929

• 4:51Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:52Speaker 07

  by the, by a Dr. L.F. Schmaus.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:57Speaker 07

  And it's called Case of Arachnoidism Spider Bite.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  Spider Bite.

• 5:00Speaker 07

  In JAMA. And this is what a lot of papers point to as the first likely reported scientific, like, clinical case study of a bite from a brown recluse.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  Mmm.

• 5:12Speaker 07

  And if you are a spider nerd and you heard the scientific name in the firsthand, Laxocellus reffessans, that, I think, is what it initially was called before they changed it to reclusa. I don't know the timeline of.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  There's also, there's another species that's like the Mediterranean recluse that's like reffusans now today. So like, who knows which species it actually was at the time?

• 5:34Speaker 07

  Right, right.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  They're similar.

• 5:36Speaker 07

  But yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 07

  There you go.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  There we go.

• 5:39Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Erin Welsh.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  And I'm Erin Allman Updike.

• 5:42Speaker 07

  And this is This Podcast Will Kill You.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Today, we're talking brown recluse bites.

• 5:49Speaker 07

  We are.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  I'm really excited about this, actually, Erin.

• 5:54Speaker 07

  Me too. I, it's, it's so interesting how large the fear looms in many places.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:02Speaker 07

  And infamous, I think, is like.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  That's a correct, I think.

• 6:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  That's a correct. And like, I can't wait to tell everyone how undeserved the infamy really is.

• 6:12Speaker 07

  We're gonna dispel some myths here. We're gonna try to do a little bit of like reputational rehab for these spiders.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 6:18Speaker 07

  And, but also acknowledge that like, you know, they, as you will learn, the bite can be quite gnarly.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  It can be bad. Yeah, it can be bad.

• 6:27Speaker 07

  But there's a lot to cover, so.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  I'm really excited. We should finish our intro.

• 6:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  First up, it's quarantine-y time.

• 6:36Speaker 07

  It is. This week, we are drinking a tangled web.

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  A tangled web.

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  Yeah, it is. Hold on, I wrote in my notes, because we picked this out. Cherry juice, lime juice, soda water, and maraschino cherry syrup.

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  A little bit reddish, a little bit bloody, maybe.

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  Sure, yeah.

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  Yeah, it's delicious. It's refreshing. You know, check it out.

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  We'll post the full recipe on our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, and on all of our social media channels. So make sure that you're following us there if you're not already.

• 7:05Speaker 07

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• 7:24Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Rate, review, and subscribe. We'd like to remind you. Shall we get into this?

• 7:29Speaker 07

  Let's do it.

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  Okay.

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  After this quick break.

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• 10:45Speaker 05

  So today's episode is not about all spiders by any means, because spiders are incredibly varied. There are somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 species that we know of and probably another 90,000 species we have yet to discover or name. And they exist in every ecosystem on the planet, except for Antarctica, etc.

• 11:09Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  But what we are talking about today is one specific spider, which is the brown recluse, Loxocellus reclusa. Now, this is one of a handful, literally just a handful of spiders that are considered medically important. In fact, there are at least 100 related species of Loxocellus. Many of the venoms of these different Loxocellus species all act very similar. So I'm going to focus on the brown recluse today, because this is like, one of the most infamous spiders, aside from the

• 11:46Speaker 07

  Black widow.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  Black widow, which I couldn't remember the name of real quick. In the US, I feel like the black widow is like, the most famous. And then the brown recluse is also the most famous. I feel like they're equal.

• 11:58Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 11:59Speaker 07

  I have no, I

• 12:00Speaker 05

  I don't have a statistic on that.

• 12:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 05

  But the brown recluse is actually not found in very much of this country. It's really only found across the south central US, from like, the lower Midwest, like halfway through Illinois, and then down into the Gulf. It goes as far east as like Tennessee, and then as far west as like, just to the edge of Texas, kind of.

• 12:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like, not quite in Colorado, for example.

• 12:26Speaker 05

  No.

• 12:27Speaker 07

  It's just the very edge.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  It's not in Colorado. It's not here in California. There are a few other species in the US. One that is called Loxocellus desertta, that is in like Arizona, New Mexico, and a little bit of California. And there are a number of other species of, again, medical importance throughout Central and South America, including Loxocellus intermediate, Gauchio, Latia, and Refusens, which is actually the Mediterranean spider that has been invasive in a number of areas as well.

• 12:58Speaker 05

  So all of these recluse species are these kind of smallish brown spiders. They're maybe like, one to two centimeters in total, including their legs. Some of the older ones could get up to like, three centimeters. So they're really not large.

• 13:13Speaker 07

  That's very small, yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, I think we're gonna have to find some pictures to post of these two, so

• 13:20Speaker 07

  We will.

• 13:20Speaker 05

  We will. But their legs are very long and slender.

• 13:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  And they don't have one of those real globe-like abdomens that we see in black widows. Their abdomen is a bit more elongated, and their whole body, the cephalothorax, the top part, and the abdomen, they're quite a bit flatter than other, like, real hefty-looking spiders. And they tend to sit with their legs quite outright. They're not all bent up. And that's because they like to hide in teeny tiny little cracks and crevices. So they're really a flatter spider than some big, like, you know,

• 13:57Speaker 07

  Right. Tarantula-looking

• 13:59Speaker 05

  Right, exactly.

• 14:00Speaker 07

  Guys.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  They can vary in color from a like, lightish yellowy brown, to almost a gray. Or, as they get older, they darken, which I think is really interesting. So they can be quite dark brown if they're an older spider.

• 14:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  And they're very famous for having this so-called violin pattern on their cephalothorax.

• 14:22Speaker 07

  Or fiddle.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  Or fiddle, a violin or a fiddle. So they're often called violin or fiddleback spiders. I don't see a violin, as hard as I try. In theory, it's like, the neck of the violin points towards their abdomen, and the body of it is towards their head. I don't think it looks like a violin at all.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  Huh.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  And there's plenty of other spiders that have similar, like violin patterns. So really, that's not a good way to identify them. What is a good way to identify them is that, number one, their abdomen and their legs are one color. They don't have patterns on their abdomen or on their legs. So if you see a spider that has a pattern on their belly, or their legs have speckles and splotches, that's not a brown recluse. And they have six eyes.

• 15:09Speaker 07

  I have that as a fun fact.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  So fun. And they're arranged in three pairs. So they have these two in the middle, and then two on either side. It's kind of cute and ridiculous looking.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  And so that's how you can kind of identify them. They make webs, like, pretty much most spiders, but they don't make those beautiful, like, Charlotte's Web kind of webs, like you think of.

• 15:32Speaker 07

  Orb weaver type.

• 15:32Speaker 05

  Orb weaver types. In fact, they make these really tangled mishmush sheet webs, that they use to just kind of cover little cracks in bark, or under rocks, or holes in the ground, or maybe in a pile of lumber in your backyard, or

• 15:48Speaker 07

  Bookshelf, or under your bed.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  In your basement, whatever it is. And they can live for a number of years.

• 15:56Speaker 07

  That's another of my fun facts.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  I'm so sorry.

• 15:58Speaker 07

  I'm gonna have nothing to talk about.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  I won't say anything more. Okay.

• 16:03Speaker 07

  No, no, they live. It's okay. You can keep going.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  That's literally all I have there. And that's the spiders themselves, okay? So, the most important thing about spiders for humans is that they make venom. All spiders make venom. And the last time that we talked about venom was in our snake venom episode.

• 16:24Speaker 07

  Wow, yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  A really long time ago.

• 16:26Speaker 07

  We need to do more venoms.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  I know. And to distinguish a venom from a poison, which I feel like is important, a poison is a toxic substance that's produced in nature, so by a plant or an animal, that usually can produce symptoms via any kind of contact. So contact with mucous membranes, or via ingestion. Whereas a venom is a specific type of poison that is delivered via this specialized system where it has to be injected, okay? Most venoms are used either for prey capture, or as self-defense.

• 17:00Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  And while all spiders have venom, and venoms are by no means unique to spiders, or even arthropods, lots of animals make venoms, spider venom is really interesting, because it can vary really widely across the spiders, all spiders.

• 17:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  But in all of them, they're housed in this specialized pair of appendages called the chelicerae, which I think are very cute.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  And they're basically, they, I think people think of them as the fangs, because it's what sticks out from a spider's little face.

• 17:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  But if you think of like, your hand as the actual chelicerae, and then your fingers are their fangs, fangs sit tucked up underneath their chelicerae, and then the venom glands are located in the chelicerae. They have a duct that goes down to the tip of the fang, and they're surrounded by muscles and nerves. So the spider can actually control how much venom it releases with each bite, or whether it releases any venom at all.

• 18:00Speaker 07

  Interesting.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. And so, basically, when a spider is ready to, it flicks its fangs out, and then, whuk, stabs them in, and then releases whatever type, whatever mixture of whatever amount of venom they decide to do.

• 18:14Speaker 07

  What are the fangs made of?

• 18:17Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't know.

• 18:18Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 18:19Speaker 05

  Chitin? I don't know.

• 18:20Speaker 07

  I know, just like, is it specialized chitin? Like, why, you know, how do they actually penetrate human skin, for instance? Or, you know, does it, and, yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  That's a great question. I don't know. I didn't look that much into detail of it. Most, I mean, spider exoskeletons in general are made of mostly chitin, so I imagine it's just like, a specialized, extra hardened chitin. They do have to be large enough in diameter, and sharp enough to be able to penetrate human skin. Most spiders, their fangs are not sharp enough, or large enough, to penetrate human skin.

• 18:50Speaker 07

  Which is, it is, and this is where I didn't even get into, I didn't look into this at all, but it's, it's interesting to think about, like, brown recluse spiders being quite little.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 18:59Speaker 07

  Why, why do they have fangs that are capable of this?

• 19:02Speaker 05

  That can do that. Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah, I don't have an answer for that. Little, little beat bops. I mean, black widows are real small, too.

• 19:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, they are.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I don't know.

• 19:12Speaker 07

  Huh. But then similarly sized, or larger spiders don't

• 19:16Speaker 05

  Don't necessarily, yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  Or, or maybe their venom is just not as potent.

• 19:20Speaker 07

  Their venom is not as potent.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  Right, even if their bite can penetrate.

• 19:23Speaker 07

  Spider bites, yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, let's talk about the venom of the brown recluse, shall we?

• 19:29Speaker 07

  Let's do it.

• 19:30Speaker 05

  It is a lot. Like, there are a lot of different enzymes contained in this venom. It is not just one thing. But the most important of which we think for human, like, the kinds of symptoms that we see from a human bite, is called Sphingomyelinase D, which is just one type of enzyme. But what it does, is it attaches to our cell membranes, especially on our red blood cells, but also on, like, our endothelial cells. So that's the cells that line our blood vessels, and lots of other cells, kind of indiscriminately. And what it does is disintegrate these cell membranes. So it causes our cells to lice and break open.

• 20:11Speaker 07

  Not great.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  Not great. And that, in our body, is going to cause the release of a huge amount of inflammatory markers, right? It's going to stimulate our immune system, because we're like, why are our cells breaking open? It's also going to trigger our clotting cascade, which, see our hemophilia episode for all the details on that.

• 20:31Speaker 07

  Four, five years ago, who knows how long.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  At least, if not more.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  And so what this means is that things like our red blood cells are being hemolized. They're breaking open. The stuff that's in our red blood cells are spilling out and our clotting cascade is being activated. And so this can cause both bleeding and a coagulopathy, so blood clots that can form. So then what we can see is surrounding, surrounding the area of the bite where this venom has penetrated, we can see tissue death or necrosis. And as this venom diffuses through our bloodstream, we can see more serious symptoms, depending on kind of how far it goes and how rampant the immune response really is.

• 21:14Speaker 07

  And does that depend on location of bite?

• 21:18Speaker 05

  It's such a good question. It probably depends on a lot of different things. The location of the bite, how much venom was injected, or whether venom was injected at all. And I tried to get a sense of like, how much venom does a spider bite give you? And I couldn't. I don't know if you found that anywhere. I found one paper that said that the approximate amount of venom per bite was 2,000 nanograms. But the citation on that was like, a personal communication with some dude who raises spiders. So.

• 21:45Speaker 07

  Also, like, that number has no meaning.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  It has no meaning. Exactly. Like, how many milliliters? I don't.

• 21:51Speaker 07

  I have no idea.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  It's a very, very small amount, right? This is a teeny spider. It's injecting a very small amount, but it's very potent venom, right? So it's going to depend probably on the amount, on the, on the location, on the age of the person. So kids seem to be more adversely affected than adults when they get bitten. And then probably other things too, especially when we talk more about the symptoms. If you have something like diabetes, that's going to delay your wound healing to begin with, right? So there's going to be a lot of individual factors that play into how bad this bite ends up being. And the thing is that as scary as that venom sounds, right, this venom is diffusing into your skin and blood vessels and disintegrating cells as it goes. It sounds pretty bad.

• 22:34Speaker 07

  Leaving a trail of destruction.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  Right? You are so unlikely to be exposed to this venom.

• 22:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 05

  Because first of all, these spiders are nocturnal. They're not out and about wandering around when we are. They're holed up in teeny tiny cracks and crevices. They are not aggressive spiders.

• 22:56Speaker 07

  They're really not. They're called recluse for a reason.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  Right? They are really not aggressive. Like, there are spiders in Australia that will chase you around the room, or like, rear up and attack you. And these spiders really don't. They really, really try to avoid contact with you. And they will bite you if they are, for example, wrapped up in your summer towels that you finally take out and then wrap yourself around in, and they get squished between you and a towel. Those are the kinds of situations that they bite within.

• 23:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 23:26Speaker 05

  But despite their quiet nature, their venom can pack quite a punch. So it's often called necrotic arachnism, or gangrenocutaneous arachnism, or even luxocelism.

• 23:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, I've seen that a lot.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  When you get invenimated by a brown recluse. And most of the literature kind of splits the array of symptoms that we can have into four kind of categories. One is no symptoms at all. One is minor injury. I guess that's number two. Three is like a slightly worse skin lesion that may leave a scar. And then finally, you can have systemic symptoms. So we can kind of go through all of those. Often, the bite itself is not necessarily painful, which can mean that it's hard to know right away if you got bitten. You don't necessarily feel the moment that those fangs puncture your skin. But usually, within a few hours of a bite, you might see redness

• 24:25Speaker 05

  or swelling, and you might have a kind of burning pain or itching, not dissimilar to any other, like insect bite, really. And then at some time, over the next few hours or couple of days, you might see a central area of kind of necrotic tissue, or this dead kind of tissue that starts to develop.

• 24:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 05

  It might look just like a kind of duskier color that doesn't necessarily look like dead skin. It's just sort of like a duskier color with like, a reddish ring around it. Or it could look like kind of a blood blister in the center.

• 25:01Speaker 07

  These are all Googleable pictures, if you would like to see for yourself.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  Although so many pictures on Google are like, probably not actually a brown recluse bite.

• 25:10Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, that is also the story of brown recluse.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  And then this can progress to basically like, a necrotic area of tissue that's usually really well-defined, and then surrounded by redness, which depending on the area, could spread like, a good ways up, say, your arm or something over the course of a few days, or it might just be right around where that wound is. And even though this can result in an ulcer that eventually kind of sloughs off and takes quite some time to heal, it generally will heal on its own, even without any major medical interventions. And I think it's easy for us to hear the word necrotic tissue and think, that's really bad, I'm going to need surgery, etc. But it's usually just the first couple of layers of skin,

• 25:56Speaker 05

  and that like, a little bit of dermis that gets affected. And so this usually heals completely on its own.

• 26:02Speaker 07

  It's interesting. I was going to ask about like, which proportion, you know, how, how do all bites fall into these different categories of no, you know, minor wound to etc.? But I would imagine that it's really difficult to get accurate numbers, given how many bites are misdiagnosed, or how many, you know, wounds are misdiagnosed as brown recluse bites.

• 26:24Speaker 05

  Yes. The number that I saw over and over in the literature, and I don't know how they came up with this, but they said that 90% of the time, there's like, no need for medical intervention at all. So it's only 10% of the time that a bite from a brown recluse would need some kind of medical intervention. And even that doesn't necessarily mean it's severe. It might just mean wound care, right?

• 26:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  There can be more systemic symptoms, like was described in our firsthand account, this like, generalized rash, this like, red, splotchy, little, little bumpy kind of rash that almost looks like an allergic reaction or something. Even that is usually self-limited. So even that, you usually don't necessarily need to seek medical care, or people don't need a lot of medical intervention. However, there can be more severe systemic symptoms from a brown recluse bite. As this venom diffuses through the bloodstream and causes this immune system activation, and the hemolysis, the breaking open of our red blood cells, we can start to see signs like fevers, chills, nausea, or vomiting. People might show signs

• 27:26Speaker 05

  like jaundice and dark urine, which means like, massive level hemolysis, or red blood cells breaking open. And that eventually can lead to renal damage, so kidney failure, even cardiovascular failure, like edema in your lungs, which makes it really hard to breathe. And this can, in the literature, it says, lead to death. However.

• 27:49Speaker 07

  Has it?

• 27:50Speaker 05

  We don't really know, because there were eight reported deaths in the US that were attributed to brown recluse bites between 1983 and 2004. None of these were actually confirmed by spider identification. So there are reports in the literature of brown recluse bites being fatal, but I couldn't find any that were like, really, really confirmed that there was a brown recluse. Either we saw a bite, or there was a spider recovered shortly after the symptoms started, and that spider was identified to be a brown recluse.

• 28:26Speaker 07

  Right.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  So it's a little unclear if those systemic symptoms really were from a brown recluse bite or not. And that's the thing that makes this so hard, is it's really hard to definitively diagnose a brown recluse bite.

• 28:40Speaker 07

  Or, or any kind of spider bite.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Any spider bite.

• 28:43Speaker 07

  Without having, and like, you want to make the right diagnosis.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:47Speaker 07

  But how do you do that?

• 28:49Speaker 05

  How do you do that? And technically, to actually diagnose a spider bite properly, you have to save the spider. So you have to have the spider with you. That spider needs to be identified by somebody who actually has some degree of expertise in identifying spiders, because us as the general public are really not good at it. There's some interesting papers about people sending in brown recluses. Most of them are not brown recluses. And a lot of times, you might not feel the bite initially. So if you didn't witness the spider bite, or if you didn't find a spider very close to you, or like, in your bed when you woke up with a bite, or something like that, it's really hard to directly connect those two things. And there are so many other conditions that can mimic these bites.

• 29:34Speaker 07

  My gosh, so many.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  A staph infection, a strep infection, cutaneous anthrax, avasculitis, some kinds of cancers, atypical mycobacterial infections, diabetic ulcers, septic emboli, other bites and venom stings from other kinds of insects. The list really does go on. And brown recluses are not ubiquitous across this country. So they're often diagnosed in areas that they don't even actually exist, which is wild to me.

• 30:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  But because we don't learn the distribution of spider species in med school. So.

• 30:09Speaker 07

  Right. You just learn about brown recluse bite.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Brown recluse bite. And so you see a thing, and you're like, and, and someone comes in and says, I think this was a spider bite.

• 30:16Speaker 07

  Spider bite, yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  Right? So it's, they're really hard to diagnose. We also don't have any like specific treatment or any specific diagnostics to be like, can I identify brown recluse venom in your blood? We don't have that.

• 30:27Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  And there's really no consensus on how we actually treat this. So it's really just depending on what someone's symptoms are, what you're going to do to treat it, which I think is interesting, too.

• 30:38Speaker 07

  Okay, let's say that you have some sort of necrotic skin lesion.

• 30:42Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:43Speaker 07

  Does your course of treatment differ based on whether that's caused by a spider bite versus something else? I mean, yes, it could.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  It could.

• 30:52Speaker 07

  It is kind of interesting, like how, I don't know, like, does, does it?

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 30:57Speaker 07

  When, when would you, I mean, maybe if it's like MRSA, you're using antibiotics and stuff like that.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 31:02Speaker 07

  But like.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  I think that's the biggest thing is like whether we need to use antibiotics. If it's just a spider bite, you probably don't, but it might really look like something that you would want to use antibiotics for. So it is, it is, it's one of those that just is going to need monitoring, right?

• 31:15Speaker 07

  Right, right. Did you see anything about immunity?

• 31:20Speaker 05

  I did not. Did you?

• 31:22Speaker 07

  I did. I mean, only minorly. And I don't know if I actually wrote it down anywhere, but there was a study that looked at exposure to, like, of rabbits to spider bites, multiple spider bites. And so they did say like, okay, yes, this can kill a rabbit.

• 31:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 31:37Speaker 07

  But.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  We have a lot of good animal studies on the effects of, of the venom in animals. Yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 07

  But then they also said that those rabbits that did not die from the spider bite, then re-exposed, tended to have less severe reactions.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 31:50Speaker 07

  But it was also like, it was not, I don't, I don't think this was a recent paper, and I don't think this was like a super, it was just sort of like discussed. So I don't know the degree of immunity, or like whether that was demonstrated clearly or just suggested.

• 32:05Speaker 05

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 32:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  Well, Erin, that's brown recluses. Can you tell me about these spiders? And our, our long, I assume it's a long history with, with these, although I don't know. What, is it?

• 32:19Speaker 07

  I, you know, that's a great question.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 32:21Speaker 07

  Let's, let's see what we can find out.

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• 35:29Speaker 07

  Brown recluse spiders, like we said, are infamous. They are widely feared. They are hated, even, I would say. There are not a small number of people who actively hate, not just, not just brown recluse, but all spiders. But it is, it is fascinating that of the 53,000 or so species of spiders on this planet, they're, they are only one of a handful with name recognition.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 07

  We can probably name a few other ones. Wolf spiders.

• 35:57Speaker 05

  Wolf spiders. But does, do you, I feel like I can say wolf spider. I don't know that I can picture. Well, probably.

• 36:02Speaker 07

  I think I can.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  Tarantulas, you know, like, but like.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Orb weavers.

• 36:07Speaker 07

  Orb weavers. But then there are different types of orb weavers. Jumping spiders, like.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  Jumping spiders. They're my favorite.

• 36:13Speaker 07

  They're very, very cute. But, but yeah, these are, these are definitely one of the few celebrities of the spider world.

• 36:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 07

  And based on what you told us, Erin, about these painful necrotic wounds that their bites can cause, that fear is understandable. Like, I'm not going to say it's completely unreasonable to fear spiders. But it is also out of proportion to the actual risk that they pose to most people.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  Like we said, if you compare a map of the range of brown recluse spiders with one of diagnosed bites, a bunch of those bites are well outside the range. Like, there was, I think, a paper that was describing brown recluse bites in Colorado, saying that they are a common seasonal occurrence. And it's like, they don't exist.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  They don't exist here.

• 37:03Speaker 07

  And if they, if they do exist here, they're like transient. And I'll get into why, why their, why their spread is not, is not very likely. But anyway, they're scapegoats for a lot of different things. Like you mentioned, there have been diagnosed brown recluse bites that are actually strep, chicken pox, diabetic ulcer, chemical burns, syphilis, Lyme disease, Steven Johnson syndrome, fungal infection. And even in that 2001 anthrax bioterrorism, that's when it was misdiagnosed as a brown recluse bite.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  That's wild.

• 37:37Speaker 07

  And it didn't happen, like, the person who, who had this anthrax, cutaneous anthrax, did not live in an area where brown recluse exists.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  But if you don't have anyone who knows that.

• 37:49Speaker 07

  Right.

• 37:50Speaker 05

  On your medical team, then why, I mean, anthrax isn't exactly common either. So why would that be the first thing that you think of? So like.

• 37:57Speaker 07

  Right.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 07

  And this is, it's sort of like, it's like when you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras. But I do feel like a lot of the time zebras are brown recluse, and everyone thinks zebras. And it's like, don't think zebras, don't think zebras. And then you're like.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  We treat them like horses, but they're actually zebras. Yes.

• 38:14Speaker 07

  Yeah. But yeah, there's, there's one report that I thought was really interesting, showed that of the 600 people, they did like a survey, who sought help for a spider bite at hospitals in LA and Arizona, 80% of those bites were caused by other arthropods entirely. So like, not spiders.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  Not spiders.

• 38:33Speaker 07

  But the, the reputation of brown recluse spiders as these deadly beasties, just like laying in wait to necrose your limbs, that's actually a relatively recent reputation that they got. So recluse spiders were suspected of causing necrotic skin lesions as early as the 19th century. In the medical literature, at least, no doubt, people had made the connection long before and been like, spider bite is not good.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  Spider bite, avoid.

• 38:59Speaker 07

  No one, yeah, no one, no one wants a spider bite. But the brown recluse itself was first implicated in that 1929 case report that was in our firsthand account, that 24 year old woman in Kansas who sought medical care after being bitten. And in that case report, like, at the very end, he says the, well, you know, no case of poisoning from its bite has been reported from this region. So that's, that's not that long. It's less than 100 years ago. And occasional reports trickled in, in the years that followed. And in 1957 is kind of when things really shifted. So a case, there was a case that confirmed that a bite from Laxus celis reclusa could cause necrotic skin lesions. So that kicked

• 39:42Speaker 07

  off a slew of others. And you can actually see the rise in how often the phrase brown recluse was used, starting in about 1960. So have you ever used Google's Ngram tool?

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Uh-uh.

• 39:54Speaker 07

  Oh, it's like, it's like a tool that shows you how often a certain word or phrase or whatever is used over time. So you plot it, and it's like, a little bump, and then it's like, 1960, it starts to rise.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 40:06Speaker 07

  And it's like, still not very commonly used, but it is, it is interesting. Suddenly, the world had begun to take an interest in this shy spider. So 1960 and beyond led to this uptick in fear of this spider. But what else did we learn in this time? I've got a few spider fun facts. A few, I think I have a couple remaining. Six Eyes, got it, got that terrible vision, their nests are not, or their webs are not.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  I didn't know they had terrible vision.

• 40:32Speaker 07

  Not, not very great. Their nests are not super impressive. They can't balloon. So the way, other spiders use their silk to like catch a breeze, and they'll traverse some distances. So if you think of spider's web, I think Darwin even called them little aeronauts.

• 40:47Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 40:47Speaker 07

  Something like that. But this, this actually keeps their potential for dispersal pretty low. So when specimens are found outside of their typical range, it usually means that they were transported by human activity. So like, here's a load of lumber, here's a shipping container, here's whatever. And so is it likely for them to get established in that new area? Also, probably not, based on just environmental conditions. And so actually, I found a paper looking at what people think the distribution might shift to as climate change happens.

• 41:18Speaker 05

  I saw that one.

• 41:18Speaker 07

  And it's north. It's doesn't, it's not range expansion. It's range just shift.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  Shift. Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 07

  Um, let's see, what else? They're super shy, naturally. It's in the name. But even among other brown recluses, there's not a whole lot of aggression. Like, they're not social spiders by any means. There are some spiders that are more social, but they're not going to cannibalize each other if there's enough food to eat and enough crevices to hide in.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 41:45Speaker 07

  Which is kind of interesting.

• 41:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:46Speaker 07

  They can grow quite abundant within dwellings. So there's a, there was a house in Kansas that was 270 meters squared, or about 2,900 square feet.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 41:59Speaker 07

  Where 2,055 spiders were recorded over six months. So one researcher caught more than 80 spiders in under an hour by hand. Yeah. Um, yeah. So they do quite well in human habitats. And sometimes you will find that in the edges of their ranges, like of their geographic range, they're only found within dwellings, like human dwellings.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 42:26Speaker 07

  Because outside, maybe it gets too cold or something like that.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  The environment's not great for them.

• 42:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. And so they're harder to detect in nature. They also can live for a surprisingly long time, even though they are quite fragile. And many throughout their lives will become injured while capturing prey. So they will lose limbs and they don't grow back in subsequent molts.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  Oh, babies.

• 42:48Speaker 07

  There was an experiment that showed that in under house-like environments or conditions with like temperature control and stuff, male spiders lived on average 646 days and females lived on average 794.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  So that's like two, three years?

• 43:07Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm. But 25% of females lived for more than 1,000 days. And the record was 1,755.

• 43:18Speaker 07

  It's a long time. They are long-lived. They are long-lived.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  Very long-lived. But just hanging out in your bookshelf in the book you never read.

• 43:24Speaker 07

  Just chilling. Yeah. Because they're, they also do really well under, with very low resources. So that was with food and water. That's 1,700 and beyond. But another experiment found that spiders, these spiders can live for six months in airtight containers without food, water, or air.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  What? So they just like shut down metabolism entirely?

• 43:49Speaker 07

  I think so.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  They're just like, we will rest.

• 43:51Speaker 07

  We will rest.

• 43:51Speaker 05

  We're really good at that.

• 43:52Speaker 07

  Yep. Yep.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 43:54Speaker 07

  But when they do dine, they prefer dead prey over live prey. And that dead prey could be freshly killed, several months old. Maybe it was killed by insecticides or another brown recluse. They, that's what they like.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  Okay, sorry. Then why do they have such intense venom?

• 44:13Speaker 07

  I don't know. That, I, I really tried to find like evolutionary blah-bitty blah about venom ecological role for brown recluses specifically. And maybe my search terms were off. I don't know. Maybe we are just unlucky that like there's like the compatibility, that venom just happens to be really compatible with us.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  Blood.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  I don't know.

• 44:38Speaker 05

  Like breaking. That's just so interesting. If they're mostly eating dead stuff and they're not aggressive even to other spiders.

• 44:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 05

  Or is it like, because I know, and I wish that I had looked into this more, but I know there's like, you know, the, the people who want us all to be less afraid of spiders will say, how much more potent certain spiders' venoms are, but they can't penetrate our skin, right?

• 44:57Speaker 07

  Right.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Like daddy long legs and stuff. And I, I don't, I've never looked into the veracity of those claims, but like, maybe that is the case. And so it's just like combo of bad luck. They've got super sharp little.

• 45:08Speaker 07

  I wish I knew more. Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 05

  So interesting.

• 45:11Speaker 07

  But yeah, they're very much sit and wait, even if, so they'll like kill something and then wait, come back to it later, whatever. But 92% motionless of their lives.

• 45:21Speaker 05

  Motionless.

• 45:22Speaker 07

  Not motionless.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  Motionless. Imagine.

• 45:24Speaker 07

  Quite relatable. Yeah. Just like, many days I feel like 92%.

• 45:31Speaker 07

  On the reproductive front, they're not very prolific compared to other spiders. So their egg sacs contain like 50 eggs, about half of which hatch. But there are other spiders that hundreds to thousands of egg sacs, or that have eggs in their egg sacs.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:46Speaker 07

  Yep. So these spiders, as you can see, have rich lives beyond their venomous potential. But I will acknowledge that, yes, their venom is one of the more interesting things about them. So let's talk about it in a little bit more detail. So Erin, you covered all the ins and outs of this specific venom of the brown recluse. And so what about spider venoms more broadly? Again, they are incredibly varied. They, all spiders produce them, well, sorry, the vast, vast majority of all spiders produce venom. There are, there's one family that has lost, that had, once had apparently that ability, but they've, they've lost the ability to make venom.

• 46:25Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 46:26Speaker 07

  Yep. And across the over 50,000 spider species that make venom, they make a bunch of different kinds. How many? We have no idea because spider venom is relatively understudied compared to things like snake venom or even scorpion venom. And most research looking at spider venom has been directed towards these handful of species that are medically important.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:50Speaker 07

  So why do spiders make venom? Why does anything make venom? It usually falls into one of three reasons. There's defense, there's competition, and there's predation. So most spiders make venom to incapacitate and kill their prey, but defense also of course plays a role. So for instance, some research has found that in some species, males and females make different kinds of, have different types of venom profiles.

• 47:16Speaker 05

  What?

• 47:16Speaker 07

  With females making more complex but less toxic venoms in one situation. This might be due to how males and females of different species live. So maybe males of a species are more likely to encounter a wide range of prey. Maybe they're, they have more generalist venom, for example. Maybe females of a species move around more and carry an egg sac, need to eat more, so they might have a more powerful venom for defense. Venom composition can also change from individual to individual and across the spider's lifespan. Venom is costly to make, so they're typically going to be very economical with like, there's been studies that show that the amount of venom injected by a spider or deployed by

• 47:59Speaker 07

  a spider correlates sometimes to prey size. So if a prey is smaller, they're going to use less. If the prey is bigger, they're going to use more.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  So they're like really making a decision and controlling those?

• 48:12Speaker 07

  Well, decision is, yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 48:15Speaker 07

  But they modulate how much venom is, is used.

• 48:18Speaker 05

  Oh, how interesting.

• 48:19Speaker 07

  And they typically will only deploy it as a last resort. So especially in a defensive situation, they're like, can I, can I just run away without, without wasting all of this venom?

• 48:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 07

  Or do I have to use it? And so that's why like brown recluse, it's like only in the last resort. They're trapped. Oh my God. Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 05

  Do they, do we have any evidence? Do they dry bite the way that sometimes snakes do?

• 48:40Speaker 07

  I think that they do. Yeah. I think that's what I read.

• 48:43Speaker 05

  So interesting.

• 48:44Speaker 07

  But yeah, spiders can inject their venom with a bite. They can imbue it into their silk so that if a little critter comes, it can start acting to either immobilize it or kill it.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  What?

• 48:56Speaker 07

  And there's even some spiders that can spray it defensively, similar to like spitting cobras.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  Out of their fangs?

• 49:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:04Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 49:05Speaker 07

  Exactly. But however they deliver the venom, whether it's specialist or general, spiders do it well. They are some of the most successful and abundant predators on this planet. Each year, this is, if you walk away with one fun fact, this is it.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 49:22Speaker 07

  Each year, spiders consume between 400 and 800 million tons of insects around the globe.

• 49:28Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 49:29Speaker 07

  By comparison, humans consume around 400 tons of meat and fish every year.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  Seriously?

• 49:37Speaker 07

  That's what I read.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  I am, I am astounded by those numbers.

• 49:44Speaker 07

  I know. That's a lot of biomass.

• 49:46Speaker 05

  That's a lot of biomass.

• 49:47Speaker 07

  And most of that is other insects, including those characterized as agricultural pests. A healthy ecosystem means lots of spiders. They play a big role in food webs as both predator and prey.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  Food webs.

• 50:02Speaker 07

  Exactly. I mean, we use web for so many different things. I was just, yeah. But they, in cultivated areas like farms and orchards, they are of tremendous importance in keeping down numbers of critters like aphids or any other, any other pests. None are coming to mind right now. But they're especially helpful in areas that are pesticide free. Because if you're, if you're like, if you can avoid just like spraying and spraying and spraying.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 50:30Speaker 07

  Spiders are your friends.

• 50:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, they are.

• 50:32Speaker 07

  They've also been used in other contexts for biological control of pests. So for instance, some studies have explored the use of spider species that prey on brown recluse to keep numbers down within dwellings. So they're like, brown recluse do have natural predators. If you don't want a house infestation, that's understandable. They do, they do pose, you know, a medical risk.

• 50:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:56Speaker 07

  And so you could, so there's been some studies saying, what if we introduce or have present the other spiders that occur in this area that prey on brown recluse?

• 51:07Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 51:07Speaker 07

  It's a great idea. Another study found that they, when they introduced spiders, it's an old study, but they introduced spiders in houses in South Africa that preyed on flies. And this is not brown recluse related. But they found that cases of GI infections declined with the declining fly population.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 51:27Speaker 07

  Because as they would move around.

• 51:29Speaker 05

  Move their poopy grossness around.

• 51:31Speaker 07

  Yeah. But spiders are on the decline. Like insects, populations of arachnids also seem to be decreasing over the past decades across the entire globe. And what that will mean for ecosystems is unclear. Can't be good.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  No.

• 51:47Speaker 07

  One of the major hurdles, though, in conservation of spiders, just like in conservation of parasites, is the widespread dislike and fear that surrounds this group of animals. There was one study that found that between 20 and 30% of people in the UK felt anxious or fearful around spiders. And an estimated 3% to 6% of the global population has arachnophobia.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  That's actually lower than I expect, 3% to 6%.

• 52:15Speaker 07

  Well, I think it's to have it be character, like as an phobia.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  As an actual illness.

• 52:20Speaker 07

  As an actual illness, yeah. It has to reach a certain threshold. There are questionnaires that try to assess this and like physiological responses. But I do think that like that 20, 30% of people was specifically in the UK. I think that that's probably fairly standard, if not like under.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  If not low.

• 52:36Speaker 07

  Yeah. In some areas, higher in others.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 07

  Fear of snakes is up there too, as well as like one of the other common phobias. But I would guess that more people know the word arachnophobia than they do the phobia for snakes. Do you know the one for snakes?

• 52:53Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 52:54Speaker 07

  See?

• 52:55Speaker 05

  Erythelophobia? No, that's too general.

• 52:57Speaker 07

  It's ophidiophobia. Ophidiophobia, yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Didn't know that.

• 53:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, me either. Fear of spider, like, why do we fear spiders, right? And it's been suggested that it is evolutionarily ingrained within us because there, the spider bites can be harmful.

• 53:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 53:16Speaker 07

  But the number of spiders that actually pose threat to humans is pretty low. This is kind of a false equivalency, but you are 2,500 times more likely to be killed by a human than a spider. As an example. This fear is also heavily tinged with disgust.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 07

  Which is, is kind of interesting in the context of other, other animals that we fear, right? Like, I don't think snakes is highly associated with disgust.

• 53:43Speaker 05

  Right, it's just fear.

• 53:44Speaker 07

  Fear.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 07

  And some researchers have suggested that this presence of disgust points toward it being a learned fear, like carried down in cultures over the years. And historically, in many regions of the world, spiders were thought to carry disease and transmit disease.

• 54:03Speaker 05

  Huh.

• 54:04Speaker 07

  And so maybe fear and disgust ling, towards spiders lingers because we thought that they caused disease.

• 54:11Speaker 05

  Disease.

• 54:11Speaker 07

  Plague.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  That's so interesting.

• 54:14Speaker 07

  It could be both. It could be partially evolutionary, evolutionarily ingrained. It could be learned.

• 54:20Speaker 05

  I always just thought it was the way that they move. I was scared, you know, I was very scared of spiders for most of my entire life and had to unlearn that fear.

• 54:32Speaker 07

  In Panama?

• 54:33Speaker 05

  In, actually even before Panama, like in part just doing entomology, having to be able to hold a tarantula to show to little kids.

• 54:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  And then, yeah, and then it was just like, I didn't, I was embarrassed to be an entomologist in training and be afraid of spiders. And then having kids, I was like, I don't want them to be afraid.

• 54:55Speaker 07

  You don't want them to be afraid, yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 05

  So now I like really have to be like, I'm not afraid at all. But there is just something deep.

• 55:00Speaker 07

  Does it linger?

• 55:01Speaker 05

  That lingers where when I, like, I will always pick them up and take them outside. We'll look at them, oh, these are so fun and cool. Look at their little body parts. But there's just something that.

• 55:08Speaker 07

  Inside, you're freaking out.

• 55:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. Hide it very well.

• 55:12Speaker 07

  Hide it. Conceal, don't feel.

• 55:14Speaker 05

  Yes. Thanks, Elsa.

• 55:17Speaker 07

  I, I don't feel, I like, I've never had an issue with spiders. Cockroaches and house centipedes have really been my.

• 55:24Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 55:25Speaker 07

  My absolute terror.

• 55:27Speaker 05

  Just creep out, yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 07

  Just vomit, like feeling like nauseous and cold sweats all over.

• 55:33Speaker 05

  How interesting.

• 55:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I mean, growing up in Florida, we would have the palmetto bugs. And they, I was one that like crawled into my shirt. And so like, I just, I have, I don't like that still to this day. Panama was, was rough on the cockroach front. I would find them on my toothbrush, on my pillow.

• 55:51Speaker 05

  Toothbrush.

• 55:51Speaker 07

  Everywhere in my life.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  I remember that.

• 55:53Speaker 07

  On my, one crawled up my naked leg. Anyway, so, but we all have spider stories, it turns out.

• 55:59Speaker 05

  We do.

• 56:00Speaker 07

  Yeah. And spiders loom large in many cultures around the world. In Navajo and Pueblo creation stories, Spider Woman wove into existence the world and everything in it. And everything she created remains connected to her through spider silk, ensuring continued access to her wisdom and her protection.

• 56:19Speaker 05

  That's really nice.

• 56:21Speaker 07

  There's the Greek myth of Arachne, a talented weaver who was turned into a spider by the envious goddess Minerva. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. She was like, you want to weave? Here you go.

• 56:33Speaker 05

  Here you go.

• 56:33Speaker 07

  You think you're better than me?

• 56:34Speaker 05

  Weave forever.

• 56:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. But these spiders show us this, so many different things. Like, there's no one word or personality trait that we ascribe to spiders continuously, right? Like, sloths are lazy, foxes are sly. Spiders are everything. They're, they're, this is interaction, this intersection between horror and beauty. They're solitary, they're treacherous, so many different things.

• 57:05Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 57:06Speaker 07

  Shelob in Lord of the Rings, it in Stephen King's It is a spider.

• 57:11Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 57:12Speaker 07

  There are also women, like, often feminine. They are evoked in stories of femme fatales, these treacherous and deceitful women who lay their traps.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  With their venom.

• 57:24Speaker 07

  Spiders are also recognized for their creative talent and their hardworking nature. They've given us phrases like web and network, spinning a tail. And spiders teach us resilience, like in the nursery rhyme of the itsy-bitsy spider. And crawled up the spout again.

• 57:41Speaker 05

  And then every single time.

• 57:43Speaker 07

  Every single time, you just got to keep doing it. E. B. White, the author of Charlotte's Web, wrote, quote, "Once you begin watching spiders, you haven't time for much else. The world is really loaded with them." Isn't that cute? The story of, of how he got the idea for spider, for Spider's Web, for Charlotte's Web is he had, like, he found a spider in a barn, brought her in a shoebox to his apartment in New York. She hatched a ton of spiders and he just let them like chill.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  Just go.

• 58:15Speaker 07

  And he was just like, wanted to see them. And he was enthralled and entranced by these little spities. Yeah. And even, I think Darwin, at one point on the Voyage of the Beagle, became infatuated with spiders. He said something like, "I am red hot with spiders." He was like, just loved watching them and loved watching them balloon across the ship.

• 58:38Speaker 05

  But it's kind of cool.

• 58:39Speaker 07

  It's true, the world is loaded with spiders. And I, I used to do this a lot, especially in Panama, but I, I highly recommend, next time you're somewhere in nature at night, could even just be a backyard, take out a flashlight, headlamp, shine it on the ground.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 07

  Those glittering sparkles that you see scattered throughout the grass, throughout the trees, throughout the bushes, many of those are spider eyes.

• 59:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:04Speaker 07

  And it kind of is like, maybe that's scary at, at first, and maybe it's comforting. Because how often do you actually see them? How often do you interact with them?

• 59:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:14Speaker 07

  These things are doing so much work for us. We don't have to roll out the welcome mats for the brown recluse, the black widows of the world.

• 59:21Speaker 05

  Take them out of your house if you don't want them inside.

• 59:24Speaker 07

  Yes. Doing this episode, I think, I've never had an issue with spiders, but it did make me kind of take a step back and go, oh, there is a lot of work that these spiders do for us.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 07

  And they are cute and they are wonderful. And so that's all I've got about brown recluse bites. Do we have, and spiders in general? I don't know what I'm going to do for other Spider Venom episodes.

• 59:46Speaker 05

  Hey, we'll have more, don't you worry.

• 59:47Speaker 07

  We'll figure it out. But do you have any for me about the epi of spider bites?

• 59:52Speaker 05

  No, no, Erin, uh-uh.

• 1:00:16Speaker 05

  I think what's interesting is that unlike almost every other disease we've ever covered, we probably overestimate rather than underestimate how often we're bit by spiders in general.

• 1:00:31Speaker 07

  That's so funny.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  Right?

• 1:00:33Speaker 07

  First, is that the first time?

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  I can't remember another time that we, maybe someone who knows our podcast better than we do can tell us. But especially when it comes to spiders like brown recluses. Like, most of the time, if you think it is that, it probably isn't, which is so interesting. There was a paper from 2006 that went through all of the case reports that they could find of supposed brown recluse bites in the US. And of 908 case reports, only 8% of those were actually confirmed with a spider and like confirmation that that spider was a brown recluse.

• 1:01:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 05

  So it's really hard to say how often people are actually being bitten and how often those bites are bad enough to really need medical care.

• 1:01:21Speaker 07

  Well, and it's also interesting. It's probably both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed because how many people get bitten and never realize?

• 1:01:27Speaker 05

  Never even realize it, exactly. Although, there was that paper that you said where they found 2,000 spiders over the course of six months in a house.

• 1:01:35Speaker 07

  No one was bitten.

• 1:01:36Speaker 05

  No one was ever bitten.

• 1:01:38Speaker 07

  Yes. I forgot to mention that. That is a pretty cool.

• 1:01:41Speaker 05

  2,000 spiders all around your house. Although that was a big house. You said 2,900.

• 1:01:45Speaker 07

  2,900, it's a big, it's a big house.

• 1:01:47Speaker 05

  Big house.

• 1:01:48Speaker 07

  It's, it is reassuring, though.

• 1:01:49Speaker 05

  It is very reassuring, right? They're just living among thousands of brown recluses and never having any issues with it. That being said, I read that in Brazil, where there's a different species of Loxocellis that's most important there, there's about 3,000 annual reports of Loxocellis bites. Are those all for sure confirmed? I don't know.

• 1:02:11Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  But that's the data that I have. And like you said, it is not unlikely that the distribution of these spiders could change due to future climate scenarios, not necessarily expand. But who knows? It just makes it more important that people who work in the medical profession know where these spiders live, if they live near you, or have somebody on staff who's able to help identify spider bites, which I think we don't have enough of. So here's shout out to your local arachnologist.

• 1:02:44Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  Or entomologist.

• 1:02:46Speaker 07

  Does poison control do spider bites?

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  I imagine that they, but like they're not, you're not going to be able to like send them your specimens necessarily.

• 1:02:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  Um, as far as I know, so.

• 1:02:59Speaker 07

  Picture.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  Take a picture, but I don't, I don't know. It's, it's a great question. But that's, that's all I have, Erin, for brown recluses.

• 1:03:08Speaker 07

  Brown recluses. Hopefully, we did a little bit of, yeah. PR uplift of the species.

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  PR, don't seek them out, just leave them be.

• 1:03:19Speaker 07

  A nest, that's, that's the new PSA. Should we tell the people where to learn more about?

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  We definitely should.

• 1:03:27Speaker 07

  Brown recluse, okay. I have a bunch of different, kind of an assorted collection of papers. By Sandage et al. from 2005, Brown Recluse Spiders: A Review of Biology, Life History, and Pest Management was an interesting one. Just an overview of them. By Lydicca from 2022, The Biology and Evolution of Spider Venoms, if you want to know more about venoms broadly. And then by Davy from 1994, The Disgusting Spider: The Role of Disease and Illness and the Perpetuation of Fear of Spiders.

• 1:03:59Speaker 05

  Oh, I love that. I also loved that Biology and Evolution of Spider Venoms paper. That was my first one on my list. There's also a chapter in The Handbook of Clinical Toxicology of Animal Venoms and Poisons from 2017 that was on the biology and distribution of spiders and medical importance. There's also a paper that was really interesting, super recent, 2026, in the Journal of Medical Entomology that was Recluse Spiders: Contesting Myths on Distribution Bite Behavior and Medical Risk in Florida.

• 1:04:26Speaker 07

  I saw that one, yes.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  So interesting. They only have invasive Mediterranean recluse species in Florida. And even those are very low abundance. And they did super interesting, like trying to force these things to bite and they just didn't.

• 1:04:39Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:04:39Speaker 05

  They just wouldn't.

• 1:04:40Speaker 07

  I'm like, I don't, why? This venom cost me to make.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  I want to keep it.

• 1:04:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 05

  Anyways, that was great. There was a New England Journal of Medicine paper from 2005, Bites of Brown Recluse Spiders and Suspectant Necrotic Arachnidism. Listen, there's so many more. Check them out on our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, under the Episodes tab.

• 1:04:58Speaker 07

  Yes. Thank you to Blood Mobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.

• 1:05:03Speaker 05

  Thank you so much. Thank you to Liana and Tom and Mark and Pete and everyone at Exactly Right for everything that you do to make this podcast and our YouTube hello possible.

• 1:05:16Speaker 07

  Yes, thank you, thank you. And thank you to listeners for listening, watchers for watching, whatever, people who do stuff with this podcast. I need to find a better way to say this. Thank you, though. We do this for you and we hope you like it and it means everything.

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  It does. We will do more spiders, by the way. So tell us the spiders that you want to hear next. And a special shout out to our patrons. Thank you so much for your support over on Patreon. It really does mean more than we have good words to tell you.

• 1:05:44Speaker 07

  Truth, truth. Until next time, wash your hands.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  You filthy animals.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

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  And I'm Lisi DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all.

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  Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.