Recent research has indicated that the chances of your ‘spider bite’ being an actual spider bite are very small. Arachnologist Chris Buddle from McGill University in Montreal, Canada is suggesting that your ‘spider bites’ are more likely to be bites from other insects, stings from fleas, or your skin’s reaction to chemicals.

Buddle said:

I’ve been handling spiders for almost 20 years, and I’ve never been bitten. You really have to work to get bitten by a spider, because they don’t want to bite you.

According to Buddle, spiders are more scared of humans than we are of them. Apart from that, spiders do not feed on humans and would therefore have no reason to really bite us.

Spider bites do occur, but if anything, they bite humans because we have startled them. When we suddenly put our foot into a shoe, for example, a spider might get the fright of its life and bite. But most spiders are not toxic to humans. As the arachnids feed on small insects, their venom is targeted towards their prey and not humans.

Buddle further explains that most spiders are unable to pierce human flesh with their fangs anyway. There are only a dozen spiders that could cause harm to humans, and that dozen is from the estimated 40,000 spider species in the world.

A study showed that from 182 patients who were “seeking treatment for spider bites,” a very small percentage, 3.8%, were from actual spider bites while the remainder of the patients had infections.

Buddle said that spiders are handy for killing “nuisance insects”, those which would more likely be behind your ‘spider bite’.

[Source: Business Insider]