What Exactly Is An Everyday Spider Hoping to Achieve When It Bites You?
Unfortunately, I’m someone cursed with what’s colloquially called “sweet blood.” This would suggest something cool — like I’m beset upon by vampires, who consider me a delicacy, or that I have some sort of ambrosia running through my veins, and must be protected at all costs in a future apocalyptic landscape. But what it really means is that I get absolutely lit up by any biting bug in my vicinity.
Spiders, in particular, have been a constant antagonist of the itch-free lifestyle I prefer. Any trip to an even vaguely outdoorsy location will inevitably end up with my limbs dotted with their trademark double-bumped bite.
It’s a great curse that I don’t know their tongue, and can’t converse with them, because above all else, there’s one question I need answered: Why? It seems like a losing battle, one that they shouldn’t even have begun in the first place. After all, what purpose does it serve to make an enemy of something one billion times your size?
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I have my theories — they were involved in chasing another, smaller bug across my body or butt and just kept missing; they are testing how strong their venom is, because hey, maybe it kills me and then they have dinner for life; or simply that another spider dared them to. But despite all of my suffering at the hands (legs?) of spiders, I’m still not a spider expert. And so, I tried to find out what a few such experts might have said about this online.
What I uncovered, though, feels like a concerted gaslighting campaign to protect spiders’ reputation.
Within the first couple of Google results, I was served a page entitled “Spider Bites Almost Never Happen.” To which I say: Fuck you, man. Are you telling me that I’m setting some sort of shocking new scientific standard by getting chomped on at such levels? Am I the Promised Meal of spiders everywhere?
The post went on to clarify that spiders apparently gain no benefit from sinking their spider teeth into my flesh. Or as the post put it, “Spiders have no interest in our fluids,” something I’m considering getting made into a bumper sticker. The base message, as in other articles online, is that spiders only bite in self-defense when they’re in immediate danger. The Burke Museum, which isn’t even a spider museum, also calls the idea that spiders bite you in your sleep “a myth.”
Alright, Burke Museum, why don’t you go to sleep in a pit of spider eggs, and see if you come out sterling?
WebMD toes the pro-spider line as well, saying, again, that spiders rarely bite and that people get bitten when they “invade (a spider's) spaces without knowing it.” Well, WebMD, we’re talking about MY APARTMENT. And even if I did plop a tent down in a spider’s stomping grounds while camping, you have to think they’d be better served by fucking off than by initiating a conflict.
Many of these sources go further, too, suggesting that all my spider bites aren’t even from spiders. Instead, they maintain that the bites come from other unpleasant creatures like fleas, or that it's MRSA, which, great.
Science, people look to you to explain the unknown. You’re supposed to unravel the mysteries of life, to bring us forward into an enlightened world. I, and everyone reading this, came to you for help understanding the spider and why it insists on biting us. Instead, we were told it never happened, and that spiders are great.
Pardon me for feeling itchy and abandoned.
