We’ve all heard some variation of this rumor: the average person “eats” eight spiders a year. And this isn’t a reference to the FDA’s standards for bug bits in food – this delicacy purportedly comes courtesy of the critters themselves, who apparently offer themselves up freely by crawling into our mouths as we sleep. We don’t even have to ask them. They just do it.
Okay, it’s starting to sound a little suspect now – so is it actually true? Where did this “fact” even come from? Could it really just be a statistical error thanks to Spiders Georg after all?
First off: is it true?
Arachnophobes rejoice: it’s really unlikely that you’re unwittingly consuming an octet of octopods each year. In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll chow down on even one.
“You’ve got a better chance of winning the Powerball than having a spider fall in your mouth while you’re sleeping,” Floyd Shockley, entomologist and collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, told the Washington Post in 2023.
A fluke “fall” would be pretty much the only way it could happen, by the way. If a spider crawled across your face, you’d most likely wake up: “you’d know about it long before it bit you,” Matt Wilkinson, from Cambridge University’s department of zoology, told the BBC in 2023 – and therefore presumably also before you bit it.
But that, already, is an extremely unlikely scenario. A sleeping human body is kind of a nightmare for your average spider: it’s a huge, hot, moving, vibrating, snoring behemoth, with a mouth like “a warm, moist cave that is mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor,” Shockley said. It’s cliché to say that “they’re more scared of you than you are of them”, but in this case, it’s really true – “Why on earth would a spider go in [your mouth]?” Geoff Oxford, honorary secretary of the British Arachnological Society, told the BBC. “They just don’t do that.”
And if all that isn’t enough to convince you, take heart in this: there’s never been a single documented case of somebody swallowing a spider in their sleep.
“No such case is on formal record anywhere in scientific or medical literature,” pointed out Rod Crawford, a spider expert and curator of arachnology at The Burke Museum on the museum’s website. “Millions of people have some time or other watched another person sleep; so why don’t we have one eyewitness account of a spider trying to enter the sleeper’s mouth?”
Over the years, he wrote, he has seen “one person who found a small harmless spider hiding in her ear (which is possible), two who claimed to have had one in their noses (but had no evidence that it wasn’t already in the hanky), and a few who stated that years ago, when they were young children, they spat out or brushed from their mouths an object they interpreted (while still groggy with sleep) as a spider or spider leg.”
But even those stories were presented without evidence, he said – leading him to “remain unconvinced that a spider would visit a huge breathing monster and enter its mouth.”
Why does the myth persist?
So, if the idea that a spider would crawl into your mouth at all is so unlikely – let alone a full korfball team’s worth of them every year – why is this particular myth so widely believed?
It’s not that it originated from any particularly authoritative source – in fact, its origin is completely unknown. Yes, we know some places cite a 1993 article by one “Lisa Birgit Holst” as the culprit, wryly noting that the piece was intended as a list of things that were so ridiculous that nobody could believe them – but in an ironic and hilariously appropriate twist, that too is an urban myth (with the fictional author’s name being an anagram of “tHis is a Big troLl”).
Not that it might make a difference if we did know where it came from. According to psychologists from Duke University, we hardly ever remember where we learned a piece of information unless we have a good reason to do so – such as believing from the start that it was false. And just like a spider jumping into your mouth as you sleep, that’s actually surprisingly unlikely: “comprehending a statement requires automatically accepting it as true,” the Duke researchers explained, while “‘unbelieving’ involves a second, resource-demanding step.”
In other words, even the skeptics among us will instinctively accept new information as true before we interrogate it. You can think of it like new books in a library, the researchers explain: “the librarian assumes all books to be nonfiction unless they are marked by a special ‘fiction’ tag.”
Add into that the effect of repetition – the well-documented fact that you’re more likely to remember and believe something purely because you’ve been exposed to it over and over again – and the very real phenomenon of “truthiness”, and it’s actually fairly easy to see why so many people accept at face value the idea that we’re all habitually consuming spiders in our sleep.
And after all – spiders are creepy, and crawly, and we don’t like them. Of course they’re doing weird shit like jumping into our mouths while we’re unconscious.
Would it really matter if it were true?
So, we’re definitely not all eating eight spiders a year in our sleep, and the only reason we think we do is a myth with a mystery source and a whole bunch of cognitive biases. But here’s a question: so what if we were?
Insects are the food of the future, after all, and spiders aren’t so different – give or take a leg or two. People already fry ‘em up and eat them in Cambodia and Thailand; there’s even a town nicknamed “Spiderville” for its dedication to the local delicacy. Apparently, they taste a little like crab.
We get it, though. Just because it’s safe, doesn’t mean the idea is pleasant for everyone. But rest assured, should a spider crawl down your gullet, there’d almost certainly be “no harm done to the human,” Bill Shear, professor emeritus of biology at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and former president of the American Arachnological Society, told the Washington Post.
“In fact, a little extra protein would have been obtained.”
Source Link: Why Does Everyone Think We Swallow Spiders In Our Sleep All The Time?
