Arachnophobia

Back and feeling refreshed after my holidays, I thought it would be fun to have a closer look at spiders. They are found on every continent apart from the silly cold one that everyone forgets about, there are around 40,000 described species with undoubtedly many more to be found. They can be found in trees, in lightless caves, underwater and even in your understairs cupboard...
People are scared of spiders, it is a fact that I will not be able to change. However, I'd like to examine why people fear these amazing creatures, and maybe try and rationalise why they really aren't that bad at all.

Arachnophobia, like all other phobias, is by definition an irrational fear. Phobias are irrational, they are not reflective of the actual danger of a situation. You cannot be phobic of, for example, falling off very high things. You can however be phobic of heights. The difference is the perceived amount of danger compared to the actual danger. Falling from a great height is very dangerous, just being at a great height is not necessarily dangerous. Spiders are similar to this, although in their case the perceived danger is vastly out of proportion with any actual peril. Be that as it may, there are many people who will still insist that spiders are horrible and evil and are going to jump on their face and bite their eyes and lay eggs in their brain... This is an irrational fear. Let's look at the statistical facts. Firstly there are no species of spider in the UK that are venomous enough to kill a human. Allergic reactions are possible, and could potentially kill, but there are no recorded examples of wild spiders killing a human in the UK ever. Compare this to the amount of people killed annually by bees and wasps (4, on average) and the spider stops seeming so scary.

But what of all of the terrifying venomous foreign species? Well, again, it is best to look at the facts before judging. The infamous Redback Spider, Latrodectus hasselti, known to many as the black widow spider, is often thought of as one of the world's most dangerous spiders. The reality of the situation is that although 250 people are bitten annually, only 14 people on record have ever been killed by Redbacks. All of these people died before the introduction of antivenom in 1955. Even the spider considered by the Guinness Book of World Records to be the most dangerous in the world, the Brazilian wandering spider, Phoneutria nigriventer, kills less than 1% of people who are ever bitten, and nobody has died since the introduction of antivenom in 2004. Incidentally, the bite of Phoneutrica can also cause priapism in men, which is a justified reason why it has such a dangerous reputation.

So, given that there are very few spiders that could be genuinely considered dangerous to humans it seems strange that arachnophobia is such a common affliction. There are many proposed theories, but none that seem to dominate over any other. Some recent research in the United States suggests that female arachnophobes may have a genetic component to their affliction, whereas some researchers have suggested that arachnophobia is entirely genetic in origin. I personally think that an entirely genetic origin is unlikely, and having had a brief overview of some of the papers, their methods do not seem entirely convincing. The Avatism blog referenced a Steven Pinker idea: that we may be born with arachnophobia but are able to change it to suit our surroundings as we are gradually taught which spiders may be harmful by our family and peers. A Western lifestyle, relatively free from spiders, could result in this fear remaining for all spiders.

I find a genetic origin for fear of snakes (ophidiophobia if you're a connoisseur of phobias) potentially more convincing, simply because snakes are more dangerous to humans than spiders. Even so, they're not as dangerous as an Anapholes mosquito carrying the Malaria parasite. So why not fear mosquitoes? Scorpions kill many more people than spiders do, yet in our minds arachnophobia means fear of spiders rather than their arachnid relations. 1.2 million people died on the roads worldwide in 2004 yet we aren't all dystichiphobic. In my mind there is another factor that is at work suggesting to us our fear of spiders, which operates alongside a genetic component to our fear.

Think about the last time you heard about a spider in the news. Was it good news? No probably not. Here's the most recent spider-based "news story" that doesn't involve hollywood movies or celebrity nonsense from everybody's favourite hate-rag, the Daily Mail. "Husband blows himself up trying to kill a spider with an aerosol" Really? What was the spider going to do? Give you burns resulting in hospitalisation, thereby wasting taxpayers money on account of being a complete imbecile? Unlikely. It is hard to find anything positive about spiders in the media. Even the bastion of learned thinking, National Geographic, shows tarantulas in this video as aggressive, scary and threatening.



At the point around 0:20 the voiceover says, "these spiders are killing machines..." while showing what appears to be a Grammostola rosea, which is the same species as Dot. I've now held Dot, she's very calm and spends most of her time doing very little. If you are a cricket or a cockroach, then spiders are killing machines, if you are a human then they are not. No human on record has ever been killed by a tarantula. Tarantulas only rear up like that and show their fangs if you provoke them, the message is: 'back off sunshine, I've got big teeth.' Statistically speaking they are much safer than dogs. Try and watch the National Geographic film again, but imagining daschunds, labradors and poodles with the same dramatic music booming while the dogs feast upon other animals and the cautionary voiceover suggestively calls them killing machines. It is only at the end of the film that they make any attempt to redress the balance. Every media outlet does it, and not just the commercial ones. The BBC are supported by license payers money in the UK "To enrich people's lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain." (Their words not mine) Yet they still publish articles that play towards people's fears rather than give a balanced view. The 2008 article suggests that mild UK winters mean that "deadly black widow spiders would be our next alien invader." Aside from fact that black widow spiders (Redbacks) have not killed anyone in the last fifty five years, 2009 was the coldest winter in the UK for 30 years. Nice one BBC.

Scaremongering must have some part to play in our irrational fear of spiders. Whatever the cause of your arachnophobia - genetics, lifestyle or media exposure - you have been quite literally brainwashed into it. Nearly nobody has anything good to say about spiders, so its no wonder that so many people hate them. A friend of mine sent me a link to this video recently, which is one of most fun spider videos since this youtube classic:



The highest living permanently resident living thing in the world is a spider called the Everest jumping spider. Spiders have a evolved some of the greatest eyesight in the invertebrate world, and have also developed eyelessness in cave dwelling species. Young spiders can ride air currents and travel hundreds of miles, and males can serenade females with rhythmic sounds and dancing. Crucially, they are really not that dangerous at all. They are worthy of respect and interest, but not fear. Next time you see a spider that is a little bit too big for your liking I have a challenge for you: go and have a closer look. Don't pick it up, don't kill it, don't threaten it, and it will have no reason to threaten you. You might find that confronting your fear shows you just how irrational some phobias can be.