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Why do many of us kill spiders so casually, swatting out their lives with our god-like power, almost like it's a reflex? Of course, humans routinely kill animals when it's convenient – many...
Venom from a male funnel web spider can kill vertebrates, including humans. David Wilson Spider sleuthing. We set out to solve this mystery, using molecular analysis of the venom.
Spiders are not out to get you and actually prefer to avoid humans; we are much more dangerous to them than vice versa. Bites from spiders are extremely rare.
More than 43,000 different species of spiders are found in the world. Of these, only a small number are said to be dangerous, and less than 30 (less than one-tenth of one percent) have been responsible for human deaths.
It’s not possible to read a spider’s mind, but research has uncovered some surprising insights about how they behave around humans. Take the Jorō spider, Trichonephila clavata.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), two kinds of poisonous spiders found in North America are dangerous to humans: The black widow and the brown recluse (a.k.a. violin spider).
Funnel-web-spider venom has thousands of components, but delta-hexatoxins, the specific molecules within it that kill people, are produced in particularly large quantities by sexually mature...
