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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:10
Welcome to Episode 71. This is Ben Radford, your co-host of Squaring the Strange, in case you’re not sure what you’re listening to, with us, and by us, I mean Celestia, who’s also on. Hi, Celestia.

0:00:34
Celestia Ward:  I’m here, Celestia Ward, the other co-host. Yes. I’m here, Celestia Ward, the other co-host.

BR: Yes, and Pascual is… will be joining us shortly. Yay!

0:00:46
CW: We managed to, like, lift up a rock and there was Pascul, along with a bunch of spiders. And we’re going to be talking about spiders later on today, but before we talk about spiders, and specifically brown recluses, there’s a couple things that we’re skeptical of this week.

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0:01:22
BR: What’s on your skeptical radar?

0:01:24
CW: Well, oh, as somebody who sometimes has to design logos and really gets into iconography and everything, have you seen the so-called Space Force logos that have been all over social media lately, Ben?

0:01:40
BR: I have.

0:01:42
CW: Yes, and you know, this is not going to be a political rant. This is not going to be about politics. This is going to be about hype, hysteria, and bad design. And I will try to make it short. Now, these logos are going around purported to be choices for the new Space Force, which doesn’t exist right now and has no actual legislative vehicle to become an actual branch of the government. But we’ve been seeing these lovely little things that have popped up very derivative, not very exciting and kind of trendy in sort of a way that makes me wince. Now a good logo is going to be simple and bold and eye-catching and timeless. The Nike swoosh is probably the most popular logo that exists today. It is valued at about $26 billion right now. And it was designed by a female art student, Carolyn Davidson, while she was a graphic design student at Portland State University. She was paid $35 to design the Nike swoosh, but to their credit the the founders of Nike did make really good on that Although at the time they were just a budding little company back in 1983 they did give Davidson a golden swoosh ring with an embedded diamond and 500 shares of Nike stock Which have since split into 32,000 shares To express their gratitude at creating this timeless, amazing logo. That is all over people’s sneakers and hats and shirts and everything else these days.

0:03:20
BR: It should be noted that most logo designers don’t get that.

0:03:24
CW: This is true. It’s a job. You do it. Now, I could not find who or what agency created these so-called Space Force logos. I’m guessing they’re Russian bots. Possibly. But they were not actually revealed as being logo choices at all. They’re not proposed to be on any uniforms or as part of any sort of official space force. It is a disguised little promotional swag offer put out by the Trump 2020 pack. And according to the campaign manager, Brad Parscale, quote, As a way to celebrate President Trump’s huge announcement, our campaign will be selling a new line of gear. But first we have to make a final decision on the design we will use to commemorate President Trump’s new Space Force, and he wants you to have a say. So these are not proposed logos at all. These are designs that…

BR: This is Trump merchandising.

CW: Yes, it’s all just merchandise that is a separate little capitalistic enterprise to earn some money. They are not even as official as a Girl Scout patch. People are thinking that it’s going to be an actual logo for some sort of branch of the armed services and it’s like if you had some sort of worry that the horrendously badly designed commemorative Trump coin put out by a private coin company was going to suddenly be the new official seal of the United States of America. That’s not going to happen. So the swag itself, the designs that they have, are transparently derivative. The first two are very much based on the current NASA logo, the big blue meatball, as it’s called, the giant field of stars, it’s called the NASA meatball. I did learn a little bit about the NASA logo. It was a… it’s actually since it is a logo created by the US government, private clothing companies and apparel companies can use it for no licensing fee. It’s totally free to use. You do have to write in and get approval from the NASA Office of Communications and they have to be okay with whatever you’re going to use it on you. So, you know, I don’t, they don’t approve like NASA pasties or underwear or something like that. But, but you got t-shirts put out by Old Navy and Nike and Forever 21 and Target and some higher end items put out by Coach, Urban Outfitters, Stephen Sprouse, all of them have used the NASA logo. It’s incredibly popular right now. It’s certainly rising in popularity. I own a NASA t-shirt. Do you have a t-shirt, Ben?

0:06:02
BR: I have a t-shirt. I don’t have a NASA t-shirt, but I do have a NASA bumper sticker on my car with that logo.

0:06:09
CW: Excellent. Well, the bad news about the NASA logo licensing is that NASA itself does not get any money when you buy the NASA logo items because technically it’s not legal for them to be collecting money off of their logo because they are a government office. But the obvious success of the NASA logo all over the place seems to have caught the eye of the Trump 2020 pack. And so they’re offering these so-called logos. Like I said, two of them, the first two are blatant copies of the current NASA logo that with the little red swoop that actually is based on a hypersonic wing and the blue field of stars, which is called the meatball. And all four of them are convoluted. They communicate radically different things. One of them is a giant red field with a bunch of pine trees, and it says Mars awaits. And I don’t know if they’re trying to tell you that Mars has a bunch of pine trees on it or what.

0:07:07
BR: That would be my guess, yes.

0:07:09
CW: And the rest of them have really stylized rocket ships that range from looking like children’s toys to a trendy 1970s type look. And these are cute and bubbly and they’ve been described as sort of clip-arty by a lot of critics online. And that’s fine to have a really trendy sort of, you know, retro-looking logo if it’s something for a limited edition run of a bubblegum flavor or some My Little Pony thing or a hipster micro brew. But you don’t you don’t pick a trendy, you know, goofy little logo like that for a branch of the government.

0:07:45
BR: Do these come out of Fiverr or something?

0:07:47
CW: Yes, indeed. I wondered myself. But yeah, I can’t find out who did them.

BR: I wouldn’t want my name on them.

CW: Yes. And so you don’t need to worry. This is not going to go on any uniforms. None of these are. And speaking of the Space Force itself, the United States, the Soviet Union and the UK signed an outer space treaty back in 1967 which prohibits any militarization of space. So it’s not an opportunity to vote on a real logo for a real Space Force. It’s a swag ad disguised as a voting opportunity aimed at Trump supporters to get their money emailed by a pack and connected to a donate button, and it’s ostensibly to help a marketing team decide which gear to sell to those supporters later, hinting at a branch of the armed services that will likely never form and is prohibited by a treaty. And they’re ugly.

0:08:40
BR: And on top of it, as if that weren’t enough, they’re ugly.

0:08:44
CW: Yes, so that’s all I have to say about the so-called Space Force logos.

0:08:50
BR: Well, I certainly appreciate your knowledge of design coming into play here. This is a… glad to have some insight there.

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0:09:01
PAscual Romero: Hey guys, I’m back. It’s Pascual. How are you guys doing?

CW: Yay! Pascual! Hey! We missed you.

PR: Do you notice my new haircut?

0:09:18
BR: I love it.

0:09:19
CW: Pascual, have you entered the Witness Protection Program?

PR: I have. I have. It’s been stressful, but they’re letting me use my real name on podcasting. So I think…

BR: It’s no longer Carlos Danger?

PR: Oh, yes. So, yeah, I’m back. I’ve got a crazy schedule these days, but I’ve reentered the world of communications. But never fear, everyone, we’re figuring it out as we go. You’re going to hear a little more of me going forward, and I think it’ll be a lot of fun.

0:10:08
BR: Very cool. What’s on tap for today?

PR: So today I want to talk about a little creepy crawly, the notorious spider here in the United States known as the brown recluse spider.

CW: He’s notorious everywhere. We don’t like him here either. All parts of the Southwest really kind of fear the brown recluse, king of all spiders.

0:10:30
PR: Yeah, and quite a bit of the country and really North America in general has some kind of story about the brown recluse or some kind of fear of finding them in your house. I’ve come here to kind of dispel some of the rumors because rumors abound about these little guys and in fact they are nowhere near as widespread or as dangerous as most people believe and unfortunately even experts like doctors are guilty of spreading some of the misinformation.

BR: So you’ve done more research on this than I have so are they brown and are they reclusive? I mean at least is the name right?

PR: Yeah yes to both yes to both.

BR: Okay all right.

0:11:19
CW: Well, you might also appreciate this nuance then too, Ben, that most spiders are actually brown and reclusive. Therein lies the problem.

0:11:30
PR: Yeah. So that definitely lends to some of the mystery.

BR: Never mind then.

PR: So, the brown recluse, the one that we are talking about specifically, the one with the powerful venom, is a specific recluse spider called the Loxosceles reclusa. The Loxosceles reclusa is the specific one that everyone is worried about and surprisingly actually has a relatively small habitat range in North America. It really only occurs from Texas to Georgia, from the Gulf up to about Southern Illinois. Everywhere else that you find them, typically it’s because they were accidentally transported to a different area, but most of the time it’s because it was a complete misidentification, including a few different varieties of recluse spiders that do live in the desert southwest and coastal California and things but they are not the scary venomous brown recluse that that that has garnered the crazy reputation.

0:12:45
CW: Well I mean if that particular brown recluse does have some scary venom I mean are you dead if it bites you or do you have a chance? I mean, how deadly is the venom?

PR: It is actually not really considered deadly at all. It’s not that it’s impossible for it to kill you. If you are highly immunocompromised, maybe very elderly or maybe a young child, there’s a chance it could kill you, but there’s a lot of mystery around these wounds as well because, as we’ll get into shortly, it’s not necessarily that the spider bite does that every time. As a matter of fact, in confirmed cases, it’s the, by far, a minority of bites that end up becoming necrotic lesions, but that is around 10%. And that is a number that is actually even kind of a rough estimate because as we will get into it, it is very difficult to really know how many of the diagnosed bites in hospitals, in emergency rooms, and outpatient are even actually spider bites or actually bites from a brown recluse. One of the biggest problems with brown recluse bites is that they are quite often misidentified. A lot of times people will come in with a festering wound, a lesion that’s starting to necrotize or kind of rot out. The skin basically dies around the wound. And it’s very common for doctors to see that and if a person says, well, I think I got bit by a spider, the doctor will simply come to the conclusion that it was a brown recluse bite. Other times people will bring in spiders that have bitten them and doctors will misidentify them. It’s important to note that if you’re not an arachnologist or an entomologist, it’s very unlikely you’re going to know the difference between a brown recluse and a number of other spiders that look very similar.

0:14:56
BR: There is other spiders that happen to be brown and reclusive.

PR: Yes.

BR: For example, they don’t actually come with like little tags identifying what they are, right?

0:15:04
CW: Well, there is a tag involved. There’s a marking that you look for for a brown recluse, the violin shape.

0:15:11
PR: Yeah.

0:15:12
BR: Look, here’s the deal. If I was bit by a spider, I’m going to stomp on it. What I show to a doctor is going to be unrecognizable. You’re not going to see any violins, no oboes, no pianos. It’s going to be a mash of brown mush.

PR: And that is certainly part of the issue. Most people who are bringing in spiders are definitely bringing in dead spiders. And so that doesn’t help identify them because most dead spiders are not very well intact, especially if someone just smashed it by sitting on it and got bit in the process.

0:15:53
CW: And as far as I understand it, too, spiders are not like rattlesnakes or something where there exists anti-venom that you must administer according to the species. If you have a spider bite, you just treat it like the festering necrotic flesh wound that it is. You don’t actually have a magical cure in the form of an anti-venom, correct?

PR: Yeah, as far as I know, there is an anti-venom for black widows and that’s it. As far as I know, I think it’s because of how it affects you. But with brown recluse bites, with anything necrotic, you’re really just treating the necrotizing flesh. There’s not really anything you can do about it once it starts. You just have to treat that.

0:16:42
BR: So it doesn’t really matter. I mean, doctors can be like, okay, if you say it’s brown recluse, it’s fine. The spider of the bit you is not relevant. I’m dealing with the wound here.

0:16:55
PR: Yeah, to a degree that is true. I think one of the issues that it kind of comes up with that is that treating something like necrotizing fasciitis, which is a bacteria, the flesh eating bacteria, or a staph infection or strep or MRSA or an abscess, those all generally are treated with antibiotics. However, that’s not going to help if venom is actually killing the tissue. I think what it is is that doctors may say it’s a brown recluse bite, but they’ll still treat it as if it were a bacterial infection. So I’m frankly not real sure about what extent doctors are confident that it’s a spider or not, but as long as they’re treating it as if it were a bacterial infection, then if it is, it’ll work. But I don’t have any real data on that because again, doctors are kind of giving the diagnosis and treating it themselves, and so we don’t really, you know, it’s hard to pull apart heart the cases of actual bites versus infections. You know, so it’s real tricky.

CW: After reading through a little bit of stuff on the brown recluse, it said that doctors really were not that great at identifying the brown recluse or the bites. And so I asked the doctor that I know, hey, how good are emergency department doctors at identifying brown recluse bites? And I heard back, not really not great. They apparently just call them MRSA bites sometimes. People often present and just say, hey, I got bitten by a brown recluse. So it’s not so much that the doctors are always saying, yeah, this looks like a brown recluse bite. They’re listening to people who are saying, hey, I got bit by a brown recluse. Look at this. And then to top it all off, I found a list of things put out by an arachnologist that sometimes are mistaken for brown reckless bites. And you have a second here? Staphylococcus threpecoccus, Lyme disease, sporotrichinosis, aspergillosis, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, herpes simplex, herpes zoster, leishmaniasis, myobacterium environmental pathogens, Necrotizing vasculitis, Leukemia, Lymphoma, Primary skin neoplasms, Chemical burns, Thermal burns, Poison oak, Poison ivy, Calciferic, Umeric, Arteopathic, yeah, I haven’t even read half the list.

0:19:30
BR: So it sounds like there’s nothing distinctive about a brown recluse like a fresh one. I mean, for example, there’s not like, oh, a brown recluse leaves, you know, three evenly spaced marks, blah, blah, blah. It’s just like, it’s a red thing.

0:19:42
CW: You’re thinking of the chupacabra, that they leave three evenly spaced marks.

PR: Well, there is a way to identify the bites, but it is not easy, and by the time people come in, it’s usually too far gone. The first thing is that the wound will actually sink in rather than puff up, which is different about the brown recluse bite. Also, the discoloration, it’ll be a white spot in the middle and then like dark red to blue and even brown color around it. However, once that wound opens up and starts essentially necrotizing, it basically looks exactly like every other skin eating infection or lesion and basically indistinguishable from that giant list that Celestia just rattled off.

0:20:40
CW: Well, from that same source I found by the arachnologist, there’s actually a citizens science project out there called Recluse or Not, and that’s run by three entomologists, Catherine Scott from the University of Toronto, tone from NC State and Eleanor Spicer Rice and she wrote a book called Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Spiders and they wanted to educate the public and also kind of allay some fears about recluse spiders. And citizens like yourself can tweet a photo of a spider to the Twitter handle recluse or not and the team will look at the photo and let you know whether or not you have a recluse on your hands or any part of your body, hopefully not. And if it is, the team will record the spider’s location and habitat to add to the knowledge of where brown recluses are found. And if it’s not a recluse, the team will record the misidentified spider’s genus, you know, just so you know what you’re dealing with. And it’s kind of like an interesting crowd sourcing of spider wrangling, so that we have a better handle on where these guys are. Because there’s a ton of spiders all over the place all the time, which is why there’s a ton of reports about brown recluse spiders all the time. They offer a helpful little checklist to determine if you were bitten by an actual recluse, or if you have, you know, because as we said, there’s a bunch of things that sort of raise the red flag of, oh my God, I’ve been bitten by a brown recluse, when in actuality, you’ve got some bacteria working underneath your skin for some reason. Question one is, was there a sharp pain? In the rare cases where recluses do bite humans, the fangs are small, and there’s typically no initial pain from the bite. So, symptoms show up a little bit later. So, if there’s a sharp pain immediately, then it’s probably not a brown recluse. Did it happen outside? If so, it’s likely not from a brown recluse as they are non-existent or uncommonly found outdoors through much of the U.S. and Canada.

0:22:39
BR: I have a question. By outdoors, outside of like dwellings or like barns or what counts as outdoors?

0:22:46
CW: Just outdoors, like your camping. It does say now, I should put a little caveat here, some of the southwestern species are common in nature. So under a rock in New Mexico, you might find one, but you’re not gonna really find them, let’s say, you know, outdoors in Washington State or something. The next question is, were recluses found in the house where the bite occurred? If not, then it’s likely something else. Where they exist, recluses can typically be found in large numbers. And last question, is the ulcer filled with pus or weeping? If it is, this is most likely evidence of a bacterial infection, not a recluse bite. A physician should be seen and material from the wound should be cultured to determine what bacteria you’ve got working there. Now, do you guys remember that news story about the horrendous case in Kansas. A family was living in a house for six years. They lived in a house that was found to be infested by 2,055 brown recluse spiders.

0:23:49
BR: Did they get bit?

0:23:52
CW: That’s the thing. The total number of bites that that family ended up having is zero. So they were living in a house with over 2,000 spiders, brown recluse spiders, and they really are true to their name, they’re reclusive. Apparently most of the times people get bitten by a brown recluse it’s because they they are in a shoe and the person puts on the shoe.

0:24:12
BR: A good reason not to wear shoes folks. You heard it here.

0:24:17
CW: So primarily the biting is a response to being crushed. So as long as you know you don’t, well you got to wear shoes. So check your shoes, people.

0:24:26
BR: Well, let me just go back to the festering puss for a second.

0:24:29
CW: Oh, boy.

0:24:30
BR: As you guys know, spiders play a an outsize part in many urban legends. And one of my favorite ones and hope you’re hope you’re not eating dinner is known as the spider bite or the red spot. And it’s basically the story goes that there was a young English girl from a proper upright English family of course who was on vacation or holiday as they say there to Mexico or maybe Brazil and she was on the beach enjoying the sun and all that and she was bitten on the cheek by a spider and she of course freaked out and it went away. Her mother was there, so don’t worry about it, it’s just a spider bite, it’ll go away soon. But it didn’t. So the next day, it’s getting even worse. Overnight, it hurts and it’s getting bigger and bigger. And then so finally, they go to the doctor. And so the doctor sees this pustule, this giant boil that’s the size of an egg on her cheek. And the doctor, she lances it and all these baby spiders jump out and just spatter all over the room and she’s horrified and the girl actually went crazy with shock. Her hair went white and she went insane from the shock of it.

0:25:54
CW: True story. You heard it from a friend of a friend, right?

0:25:57
BR: Yeah. The other one is probably best known as the beehive hairdo. This one dates back to the 60s when of course beehives were very popular and she had this, she was going on a date with this young man she was trying to impress and she had this beehive all done up and she should have washed it but she didn’t want to wash it because she put so much time and money and effort into it and so she just ended up putting a bunch of hairspray on it. She said, oh well, you know, I should wash it, but this will do. And so she basically lacquered this beehive hairdo. And then one night she died. And all of a sudden she just keeled right over. And of course her parents and the boy she was trying to impress were horrified. And they went to the doctor. What they found was that she had been bitten by hundreds of spiders that had been inside the hairdo and they were actually digging into her skull. And when they did an autopsy, once again, the hair sprayed lacquered beehive hairdo burst open and all these horrifying spiders came out. True story.

0:27:03
PR: I do recall that first one from, it was a book by Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And it was a story called The Red Spot. Those are some of my favorite scary storybooks, especially because of an artist named Stephen Gammill who did a bunch of very creepy pieces and I specifically remember the face of the character in The Red Spot who had this kind of crazy-looking long face and just these spiders pouring out of her cheek and look that up if you haven’t seen it. Most people my age or our age do remember those books and that art especially because it’s fantastic.

BR: Little known fact that’s why I shaved my head.

0:27:49
CW: Well I considered shaving my head as a young girl because I had that second story told to me I think by a friend or a relative or something warning me about, because I, you know, I had a lot of shaggy hair and it was hard to detangle. And so I was always told as like a preventative warning, you better keep your hair combed out because, you know, if you don’t know, you could end up with a spider egg sac in there. You heard about that happening to that one girl, right? You know?

0:28:17
PR: Yeah.

0:28:18
CW: So it was definitely kind of a, you could call it a warning to a child type folklore presented at me to keep my hair combed. But spiders are all over our collective consciousness, our psyche. There’s a lot of arachnophobia that goes around.

BR: I go back to Lord of the Rings. One of the creepiest scenes I recall is the giant spider in Lord of the Rings. There’s just something very visceral and terrifying about an eight-legged spider coming after you.

CW: I think the name was she-lobe, wasn’t it? In that cave, the cave spider she-lobe?

0:28:56
BR: I believe so.

0:28:58
CW: She-lobe.

0:28:59
BR: Although she can be called whatever she wants.

0:29:01
CW: Well, interestingly enough, these arachnologists are trying to sort of save the reputation of the brown recluse, which has been much sullied by a lot of panicked people who believe that they’re everywhere in the US. But in folklore, there’s a lot of good tales about spiders. One of the first folk tales I encountered was Anansi the Spider, a folk tale from Ghana. It was immortalized in a kid’s book by Gerald McDermott and a couple of other authors as well have written about Anansi. But Gerald McDermott wrote and illustrated a beautiful Caldecott medal winner. And when I was back in college, I was lucky enough to get a job reading children’s books and writing activities and worksheets for them. So Anansi the spider was one of the first ones. And it’s a fascinating tale. He’s sort of a trickster figure, but also a keeper of knowledge. Not an evil figure. What I’m noticing in folklore as I poked around about it with spiders is spiders are not always evil. In fact, they’re often good in folklore. In China, spiders are seen as good luck and signs of good fortune. In Greece, the young woman named Arachne was a very talented weaver, and she spun tapestries and beautiful works of art that impressed the gods. And she challenged Athena to a weaving contest. And it turns out, Arachne was also kind of an early satirist because she ended up weaving a tapestry that pictured all the gods doing all sorts of foolish things and engaged in debauchery. And Athena was furious at this and destroyed the whole tapestry. And in her shame over what she had done and how incredibly boastful she’d been, Arachne hung herself. But Athena took pity on the girl and turned her into a spider so that she could weave forever. And so, you know, these are not exactly scary, you know, spiders are going to kill you all the time type stories.

0:31:00
BR: Let’s not forget Charlotte’s Web, which is, of course, one of the best known and best loved children’s stories. It features a very, very friendly, lovable spider.

0:31:10
CW: Yeah, yeah.

0:31:11
PR: Yeah, as well as James and the Giant Peach also has a very friendly spider in it as well.

0:31:20
CW: But none of those are brown recluses.

BR: Or black widows, would I imagine.

PR: But I think that people always have, you know, really recognized the benefit of spiders, as you can see in a lot of folklore that is very embracing of spiders. There’s even, you know, when it goes into Native America and everything, there are a lot of stories of spiders being very, very beneficial creatures and very, you know, beneficial characters in the stories. And I think that in general, our fear of spiders, you know, just comes from kind of the general fear that we have of anything small with a lot of legs, as well as, you know, spiders have fangs, they bite, you know, they can bite. And I think that, you know, most people tend to have a pretty knee-jerk reaction to them and I think that people are very quick to grab onto any story that makes them sound, you know, scary and evil and, you know, maybe it makes them feel a little better about killing them, you know, Who knows? But it’s really unfortunate that we have such a misunderstanding of these creatures because if anything, spiders do us more favors than otherwise in our day-to-day lives. They control pest populations. They control things like mosquitoes. They control cockroaches. I mean, black widow spiders, we have a lot of them here in the Southwest. One of the reasons you may not see too many cockroaches in your house is because of them because they like to stay on the ground and catch those bugs. And the relationship that humans have had with spiders historically has generally been a beneficial one, but our fear of them has kind of driven us to push them out a little bit and I think that in some ways has kind of opened the door for less desirable creatures in our homes.

0:33:12
CW: Yes. Black widows particularly terrify me. I’ve had far more run-ins with black widows than with any spiders I’ve considered to be a brown recluse. When I was a young girl like 11, 12, I had a desk in my room and I worked at that desk all summer. I had a great, you know, summer just, you know, I spent a lot of time indoors because that’s what you do when the summers are 115 degrees and I was drawing a lot of pictures on my desk and just at the end of the summer I happened to look under my desk and I’ve been wearing shorts with my knees and legs parked under that desk for quite a bit of time and I only discovered in August that there was a gigantic pretty well-developed web and a big fat juicy black widow right where my legs were and to this day it gives me the shivers.

0:34:01
BR: What’s the same thing with tarantulas? I mean, you know, tarantulas, a lot of people are afraid of tarantulas just because they’re sort of big and hairy and creepy, but they’re very benign creatures. I think if I’m not mistaken, there’s quite a few here in the Southwest.

PR: Yes, I, my mother lives up in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains here in Albuquerque, and they usually were a couple times a year where they would kind of come out in mass and you’d see them crossing the street. My brother and I used to catch them quite regularly. They’re very, very docile creatures as long as you handle them gently. I’m not advocating that you should handle one. They can still bite, but they are very mild-mannered creatures and really all they’re looking for is some food and maybe to meet another spider and you know continue their families, but for the most part just about every spider you come across pretty much just wants to mind its own business, especially black widows.  They are certainly very common here in the Southwest. They’re common just about everywhere, but here you see them a lot and I’ve had encounters. I actually was bitten once and that resulted in what felt like a very bad, basically 48-hour flu. I sat on one, I felt a pinprick on the back of my leg and jumped up real fast and a black widow scurried out from under me and soon I had a fever. Also, not life-threatening. I was a healthy, you know teenage boy and the doctor just said no you’ll be fine. So again, yeah, which again, kind of testament to most spider bites don’t even go reported including brown recluse. So like we said about 10 percent I think maybe at best actually go go necrotic. So anything other than that most people aren’t going to go in and get it treated because it’s just a little painful bump for a few days or a painful, not bump in this case, but a little painful spot on your arm and it goes away.

0:36:21
CW: So the brown recluse really, it’s unusual in that the bites are both underreported and massively overreported because there is sort of this kind of hysteria that surrounds the brown recluse. I mean, you hear about growing up in the Southwest myself, you hear about black widows, but you see those all the time. And the brown recluses are like one step above that. It’s like, oh, well, I got bit by a black widow, but at least it wasn’t a brown recluse. And I want to quote an article from Wired. This is by Nadia Drake back in 2013. She says, quote, It’s hard to think of a critter that inspires as much hyperbolic hysteria as the brown recluse spider. They’re pretty much universally hated. If you believe the tales, these small arachnids are biting people all day, every day, producing massive, stinking flesh craters that require months of intensive care and perhaps a prosthetic appendage. And yeah, that’s pretty much the way you hear about them as you’re growing up and sometimes beyond that. There was in that Wired article, she goes into some facts and figures that I found really surprising. She quotes Rick Vetter, a retired arachnologist from UC Riverside and he did some actual numbers crunching and he pulled some data from people and he asked people to please send me the spiders you think are brown recluses and tell me where you’re from. He received 1,773 specimens from 49 states and less than 20% of those, 324, turned out to actually be brown recluses. All but four of those came from states that do have endemic populations of the brown recluse. So in other words, this data that he gathered, this is back in 2005, by the way, does really kind of hold to the trend of, hey, unless you’re right in their habitat, you’re probably not gonna see one, let alone be bitten by one. In 2009, Rick Vetter took a close look at 38 arachnids incorrectly identified as recluses by 35 different authorities. And that includes physicians, entomologists and pest control operators, people you’d think would have reliable opinions, according to Vedder. There’s a whole lot of different angles to this in terms of just hysteria, pareidolia, people thinking that they see the violin shape when they really don’t. And just also kind of there’s sort of a mystique about, oh, I got bitten. I think it might be by a brown recluse. As as my friend, the the emergency department doctor said, for some reason, people really want to be bitten by spiders rather than just saying, hey, I’ve got a bacterial infection.

0:39:08
BR: Well, I had a friend of mine on Facebook post a photo a couple weeks back, and it was his forearm and there were either four or five bites, well, let me clarify, there were four or five small marks on there and he said, oh, I got bit by a brown recluse and if so, I mean, I don’t know, I couldn’t diagnose it from that, but I was like, how do you know it was a brown recluse, number one. Number two, you were bitten like five times. I wasn’t trying to be facetious, and he didn’t really answer the question. He survived. It was interesting. I assume he sincerely thought it was, but I was curious. I gently asked why he thought it was, and I didn’t really get an answer. I presumably, he actually thought it was.

0:40:00
CW: Well, see, that’s also the kind of thing you put on Facebook. Look, I think I got bitten by a brown recluse is a lot more like, hey, everybody, I want to share this with my social media. That’s a lot more exciting than, oh, man, I’ve got these herpes flare up. Look at this, everybody. If anybody sees Monica, that bitch, tell her.

0:40:16
BR: Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, it’s like there’s there’s much more cache to that.

PR: Yeah. In something that I had read, it said that especially if you see multiple bites, it’s highly unlikely to be a brown recluse because in just about any case of being bitten by one, it’s because you did something like lay on it and smash it, or you put your foot in a shoe that had it. But in all cases, it’s going to bite you once and either get squished and die or get away. Biting you several times is, if you see multiple, it’s almost guaranteed to be mosquito bites.

0:40:57
CW: I was about to say, you know what does bite you over and over again? Those bastards mosquitoes. It happens to me every time. You can almost, it’s like a connect the dots. You can see it on my leg. Oh, he bit me there and then he moved two millimeters and bit me there.

0:41:09
BR: It’s a she. Only female mosquitoes bite.

0:41:11
CW: It’s a she. Okay, I’m sorry. Those bitches bite you over and over again in like a straight line and oh, it’s infuriating

0:41:20
BR: You have to actively want the brown recluse to bite you five times You have to you have to go to you have to harass it. You you have to or you better just collect five brown recluses and just you know, have them go to town

0:41:35
PR: But you you really have to write at the same time. Yeah Yeah, you have to want that kind of that kind of action from a brown But yeah, I did actually reach out to a guy named Wade Harrell here in New Mexico He’s in Santa Fe and he owns the Harrell house bug museum at DeVargas mall Anyone any any local listeners Santa Fe or Albuquerque? I highly recommend checking it out is a fascinating place He has a bug museum full of live and mounted specimens from all over the world. He insists that he’s not a bug expert, but he is a guy that a lot of people come to with questions about brown recluse spiders. I emailed him and asked him about brown recluses and about how often he’s seen them here in New Mexico. And Wade told me that he does get a lot of questions on the Brown recluse. He actually got most of his knowledge from Rick Vedder of the Wired article, or quoted in the Wired article. And he indicates that the vast majority of recluse bites are from, especially from outside of their range. In the U.S. that is nine out of ten times certainly misdiagnosed, maybe more than nine really. But he said that in the six years that he’s had the bug museum in Santa Fe, which is an area outside of the known range of the recluse, he’s had hundreds of spiders brought in and even more photos on phones, and he has yet to see an actual brown recluse. So that’s in a state where people insist that they constantly see them and they constantly encounter them. Now The Southwest does have a recluse, but it’s not the brown recluse as we know it With the with the kind with the venom that we’re talking about There are recluses that there’s a desert recluse and a couple of other recluses. They do not live in Albuquerque or Santa Fe I believe because the altitude. But they also are not considered a threat in any real sense of the word. The brown recluse as we know it here in the US, really if it’s outside of that bubble in the south, it’s almost certainly not what we know as a brown recluse.

0:43:51
CW: Yeah, Vetter had another little data gathering thing he did in Florida later on. He and his colleagues studied six years of reported brown recluse bites from three different poison control centers in Florida and they gathered a total of 844 brown recluse bites that had been reported. But if you look at the data for all of Florida in the past 100 years of what they call arachnological data, only 70 recluse spiders, not even all of them were brown recluses, have ever been found in the entire state.

0:44:27
BR: So, Pascual, that raises a question. Why do you think they do have such a reputation? Is it just sort of that it’s become sort of the vogue thing to claim? Or did you get a sense of why they did get such a fearsome reputation?

0:44:43
PR: Well, I think it’s a little tricky to pin down, all started because the recluse does have a very potent venom that can cause the kind of wounds that we associate with brown recluse. So because of that, it certainly impacted people in terms of how fearsome that prospect is. And I think that that’s where it came from. And I really just think that it spread kind of the way all urban legends do because of how, you know, even though a very relatively small percentage of people who are bitten have any serious wounds as a result, the fact that they can get that serious just caused it to get overblown. As a matter of fact, the Tennessee Poison Center has reported a rise in brown recluse bites. However, this is information that’s being filtered through doctors, so again, we kind of have to be somewhat skeptical of whether or not they actually are brown recluse bites because, again, the only real way to be sure is that if someone absolutely did get bitten and was able to bring in a specimen that was proven to be a spider, and then it resulted in the serious kind of wound that we associate with them. So it is kind of hard to say. I think that, again, it’s probably that relatively small margin of people that do experience very serious wounds that it’s sort of spread from that, but the reality is that these are fairly harmless spiders in the grand scale, and they certainly aren’t responsible for anywhere near the number of bites that we see reported.

0:46:52
CW: So they’re kind of getting scapegoated for a lot of other things that present in urgent care centers and poison control places and hospitals where people just come out and say, I think I’ve been bitten by a brown recluse and it’ll go on the record or end up in a story about a rise in brown recluse bites but there’s really no way to be absolutely sure what the numbers are.

PR: No, there really isn’t and you know the reality is that it’s almost certain that the people reporting this are are reporting more false positives than actual positives. I read that the most likely situation is that people scratched mosquito bites and that’s what led to it, mainly because mosquito bites itch really bad and fingers touch lots of dirty things and when you scratch, it’s a very easy way to kind of pack bacteria into a wound. And so, these sorts of reports really are more consistent with that happening than a spider bite, but because spider bites are the scary thing, that’s sort of the direction we just kind of lean and sadly even doctors lean because they really aren’t experts on this kind of thing. They know how to identify wounds and they know how to treat them, but they aren’t the kind of people that you go to to find out if a certain spider is responsible for the bite.

0:48:09
CW: I like how you mentioned they’re the scarier option. There’s a great quote in the Wired article. It says, the brown recluse diagnosis carries an unlikely charisma.Quote, if you get a bacterial infection, do you tell anyone about it? Of course not, Vedder said. But if you think you got a brown recluse bite, you’ll tell everybody. You put it in your Christmas letter. I think he certainly has a point there.

0:48:24
BR: Well, look, I mean, if you get bit by a shark, then you make the news. I got bit by a piranha, I didn’t make the news, but certainly the brown recluse is going to get people’s attention.

0:48:36
CW: Yes.

0:48:37
PR: Absolutely.

BR: I’m always fascinated by these examples where in theory something should be pretty clear cut, right? Either X is a brown recluse bite or it’s not. I mean, it’s in theory, it’s like, well, why don’t we have good why don’t we have good data? But in practice, it’s much more complicated. And I’ve always I’m always fascinated by these these real world examples of something that on its face seems like a pretty straightforward question. But in fact, in practice is much more difficult to unpack.

0:49:07
CW: Well, yeah, this this this had a surprising number of angles like I said you have the pareidolia aspect where even you know our expert Rick Vedder said that people see violins where there are no violins on the backs of spiders you know if you’re looking at a little tiny spider scurrying away you can remember that there was a violin shape on its butt even when there wasn’t.

BR: Violins is never the answer.

0:49:41
CW: And that is the one thing that is the one quote-unquote identifying mark they say you can find you can identify a recluse by the fact there’s a little violin shape kind of sticking, you know off of its butt there And also the number of eyes but rarely can people even get close enough to count a spider’s eyes. And then it has the has the hysteria angle. It has the urban legend like Exaggeration angle it has the the game of telephone where people are like, Oh, no, my I got bit by a brown recluse and you know, and I’m going to tell everybody about it. And my cousin got bitten once and they were in the hospital and they lost their leg, you know, or whatever. And then you’ve also got the angle of some some cool crowdsourced citizen science going on. I would remind any listeners if you do think you’ve encountered a brown recluse, you can send that on Twitter to recluse or not and get an expert opinion right away.

0:50:28
BR: Is it like hot or not or is it different?

0:50:32
CW: Hot festering, hot festering, pus filled wound or not.

0:50:37
BR: Oh yeah.

0:50:39
CW: So yeah, just tweet the Recluse or Not team or check out their blog and you can see some interesting spiders and spider bites.

0:50:49
PR: Yeah, it’s fascinating. And I’d just like to jump in just to say that the recluse is a very tricky spider to identify, as you mentioned, and even the violin shape is something that, while the specific shape is particular to the brown recluse, it’s really easy to get that wrong with wolf spiders have kind of a pattern that could be mistaken that way. And wolf spiders are great little spiders that help out around the house. And then there’s a lot of like grass spiders and house spiders that really do look like, and the most important thing to remember is a recluse on average is no bigger than a quarter. And it is really hard, and I’m talking about legs and all. So the body of a recluse, you know, may be the size of the head of a nail. And it really is not something you’re gonna be able to see clearly enough to say for sure what it is and and like you said about the eyes they only have six eyes but if you’re looking at some at a recluse that close you may actually get bitten i don’t know i wouldn’t recommend it.

BR: If you want to be sure just have it bite you a couple times i mean you know if you’re not sure then you know just what the hell?

0:52:02
PR: If you find 10 of them, have 10 of them bite you, and if one of those wounds festers, then it might be a recluse.

0:52:08
CW: A controlled study. You guys want to do a controlled study. I love it.

0:52:13
PR: Yeah.

0:52:14
BR: Thanks for enlightening us on that, Pascual. It’s one of those topics that I’d always sort of had in the back of my head in terms of, yeah, there’s a little hint of skepticism too. Like, really? I’m hearing a lot about this, but I’m glad that you picked this topic to dive into. It’s pretty cool.

0:52:29
PR: I’ve always been a bit of a spider and snake apologist because I feel like they’ve always gotten bad raps. And so, the only thing I can do to help people, you know, at least quell their fears a little bit is the least I can do for our little beneficial buddies. Mosquitoes on the other hand can go to hell.

0:52:47
CW: Yeah.

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0:52:48
PR: We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in strange studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a 5-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts.

0:53:22
CW: Okay, well thank you, Pascual, for bringing your eight-legged knowledge of recluses and giving us an interesting topic to look into this week.

0:53:38
PR: Yeah, I was really happy to do it and I’m looking forward to future episodes where I can help dispel some myths about our creepy little friends.

CW: Spider apologist you. Well, thank you for tuning in listeners. We will see you next week when we hope to be discussing a topic that’s scary for different reasons. Not quite arachnids, but more locomotives. We’re going to talk about ghost trains.

BR: Yeah, ghost trains.

PR: That’s going to be a fun topic. I have a little bit of personal insight on it and my brother actually was involved in solving a ghost train mystery, so I’m excited to tell everyone about that.

0:54:21
BR: Cool.

0:54:22
CW: There’s a few good ones that are known in the United States and people wait for them. They say the ghost trains run on time.

0:54:29
BR: I have a couple urban legend and ghost hunting stories about ghost trains I can tell, so looking forward to it. All right, take care everybody. Bye-bye.

0:54:37
Additional music by Memory, Guitard and Feathered, and Pascual Romero.

0:54:41
Content producer, Celestia Ward. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Kronos Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, and of course, our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers. advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

0:55:05
advertisers or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo