Thread: What are we afraid of - and is it rational?

Originally Posted by Homestar

White tips are much miligned and blamed for a lot that generally has nothing to do with them. There main goal is to eat black house spiders (which I like in the house) so I remove white tips to the garden. Been bitten by almost every type of Spider (Including white tips) but not Redbacks or a funnel web thankfully.

Flesh eating diseases are generally picked up from the garden - a scratch from a rose thorn can do it, but the victim then recalls seeing a white tip and the myth perpetuates.

White-tailed spider - Wikipedia - If you check out the study done it has a lot more detail, but couldn't immediately find it.

I'm not real keen on spiders at all. I remember living in Toowoomba when we arrived from England & the young boys would tempt the funnel web spiders to come out by tapping the top of their "funnel" with a stick,...bloody aggressive things,...they'd come up to ground level with their front "fangs" right out there!
But, white tails? Last time I went to see my doctor around 8 or 9 months ago, I noticed these terrible looking red/brown large welts/sores on his forearm & hand,...looked bloody horrible. Asked him what caused it, and he said it was a white tail bite. Well being a doctor & seeing people all the time, it looked really disease ridden/awful etc, I asked him why He didn't do something about it,...He said not much could be done except possibly cutting them out & then covering up with plastic surgery etc, but He wasn't about to do that.
Pickles.

Yep, even some Doctors perpetuate the myth. Chances are he was working in the garden and get scratched on something out there. Easy to blame something most people are scared of and it makes for better headlines.

Think about it - if you're lying in bed and a spider comes to say g'day (and they do) - where's it most likely to bite you? On exposed flesh, not under the doona somewhere. Most spider bites recieved in bed are on the face...

Most of the time the white tip gets blamed I bet the conversation goes something like this -

Patient - 'Doc, I've got these wounds on my hands/arms/legs/etc that won't heal'
Doctor - 'You seen white tips around your house?'
Patient - 'Yes! there was one in the bedroom the other week!'
Doctor - 'I think you got bitten by it'

The study found that almost all people with nacrotic wounds never remembered actually being bitten by a spider - it is all circumstantial.

Lets do a test - go find the largest white tip you can - check your slippers, they like slippers. Pick it up, introduce yourself then let it bite you on the hand - you'll actually need to **** it off no end as they aren't aggresive or that fast - pulling one of its legs should work. Get back to me in a few weeks with the results. I was last bitten by one (that I remember) about 12 months ago while moving it outside (in fact I think I've only ever been bitten by any spider while handling them). Net result - small itchy red mark on my hand for about an hour.

I’ve been having a great time in this weather moving the Long Backs from around our work site...

Nothing to fear; just respect and appreciate.

Scary animals, my sister often gets coyotes in her yard . I saw more snakes there in a week than twenty plus years in Aus , and have been camping with her family in a provincial park near Toronto that got raided by bears. For me being a devout urbanite a bit hair raising.

All i know is a story i read and a picture i saw of a guys hand supposedly after being bitten by a white tip. Might have been a workcover warning stary. Guys hand looked very horrid. I think he supposedly got bitten at work indoors.

Yes. Some people react violently.
Most don’t.

spider fire.jpg

We had a guy from the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory give a talk at our club about snake bites and he also covered a bit about spiders Basically he said, avoid being bitten by ‘any’ spider because some people can have very bad reactions to the neurotoxin, no matter what type or size it is. He said there’s only one recorded death from a Redback in the last 50 years and that was an infant. The worst you’ll likely get from a Redback bite is pain so bad that you’ll want to chew your limb off, but “you won’t die”.
He was a great speaker.