Should i fear spiders

Populations of many invertebrate species, including certain spiders , are highly vulnerable. Some species have become extinct due to habitat loss and degradation. Read more: Spiders are threatened by climate change — and even the biggest arachnophobes should be worried.

In dramatic efforts to avoid or kill a spider, people have reportedly crashed their cars, set a house on fire , and even caused such a commotion that police showed up. A pathological fear of spiders, known as arachnophobia, is of course, a legitimate condition. But in reality, we have little to fear. Read on to find out why you should love, not loathe, our eight-legged arachnid friends. The last confirmed fatal spider bite in Australia occurred in Only a few species have venom that can kill humans: some mouse spiders Missulena species , Sydney Funnel-webs Atrax species and some of their close relatives.

Antivenom for redbacks Latrodectus hasseltii was introduced in , and for funnel-webs in However, redback venom is no longer considered life-threatening. Spiders mostly eat insects, which helps control their populations. Worldwide, mosquito-borne viruses kill more humans than any other animal. Tragically a wasp sting, not old age, killed her. Spider silk is the strongest , most flexible natural biomaterial known to man.

It has historically been used to make bandages, and UK researchers have worked out how to load silk bandages with antibiotics. Webs of the golden orb spider, common throughout Australia, are strong enough to catch bats and birds , and a cloak was once woven entirely from their silk. Black widows are not aggressive. For them to bite a person, you have to virtually squeeze them. The non-aggressiveness of most spiders, even the venomous ones, effectively renders them harmless.

Fake news about spiders dominate folklore and spread through the internet. For example, the bites of brown recluse spiders can cause necrosis, but it is their harmless cousins, the hobo spiders , that live in Canada. Similarly, false black widows — who look like black widows but are harmless — often find their way into our homes but are less likely to bite us than bees are to sting us when they accidentally fly into our homes.

Unfortunately, many alleged spider bites are misdiagnosed, and the bite symptoms were actually inflicted by other critters or microbes. Such misdiagnoses may even become health-threatening when they prompt inappropriate treatment s of the patient. For this reason alone, it is always helpful to capture the alleged biter so that it can be identified, and the patient be treated accordingly.

When encountering a spider at home, many people opt for spraying it with pesticide. But pesticides have long-lasting residual activity, adversely affecting us , our children, and pets. Strategically placed sticky traps e. By capturing countless insects, spiders play key roles in ecosystems and in agricultural and forestry settings.

It is the friendly neighborhood spider that helps protect our crops from insect herbivores. Once we open our eyes to the world of spiders, we will be amazed instead of disgusted and be fascinated instead of fearful.

A few stories may serve as examples. Males of the nursery web spider offer bridal gifts to their future mates. Entertainingly colorful, extremely photogenic, but no bigger than a thumbnail, the males of some jumping spiders put on a dance-off with remarkable moves to impress females. How can we explain arachnophilia if arachnophobia is supposed to be the human default? That's not the whole story, though. Cultural biases facilitate fear learning, so fears of snakes, spiders, and angry people are more easy to acquire than fears of, say, mushrooms and clowns.

Mushrooms are curiously common in phobia studies. Spider phobia researchers think up some mighty strange ways to test the speed of our reactions to spiders. Like much psychology research, undergraduates are plentiful, cheap, and make up the majority of test subjects. Nearly all experiments involving humans have to go through a university review board for approval, and I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall for some of those discussions.

I mean, putting giant dead Huntsman spiders in a room you then invite spider phobic people into seems a bit cruel. In another experiment, researchers gathered together 57 spider-phobic undergraduates and asked them to poke tarantulas with a probe until they moved. The tarantulas moved, that is.