Are These Spiders REALLY Dangerous? | with My Wild Backyard | Ailani's Little World

What if I told you some of the world’s scariest spiders are not as aggressive as people think? Today on Ailani’s Little World, we talk with Spencer Hoffman from My Wild Backyard about Brazilian wandering spiders, Sydney funnel-web spiders, giant huntsman spiders, and what actually makes a spider dangerous.

Are these spiders really chasing people, or are they just misunderstood animals trying to survive?

Watch till the end for wild spider facts, venom science, and creepy crawly surprises!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to Highlandish Little World. This will be a really fun interview with a really big YouTuber. Can you introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Yes, my name is Spencer. I run the YouTube channel My Wild Backyard. Basically, I cover all sorts of snakes, spiders, insects. If it's a creepy crawly animal, I probably have covered it or will be covering it in the future. I like to kind of investigate the secrets of the natural world. So any weird little thing that slinks in the shadows, that's what I'm curious about. And I want to kind of give these creatures a chance to tell their stories so we can actually see how the world is oftentimes a lot stranger than fiction. That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

You work with a lot of spiders. Which spider surprised you most when you met it in real life?

SPEAKER_01 0:49

One of the ones that surprised me the most was the Brazilian wandering spider. So that's one of the most venomous species in the world. And I have long been taught that they were super aggressive, they want to bite you, they'll chase you, they'll, you know, threat pose with the slightest provocation. And when we worked with it in the field, it was a sweetheart. It was like any wolf spider that I'd found back home in the US. If anything, it was almost more curious than a wolf spider. Wolf spiders like kind of sit there and do nothing. The wandering spider was kind of just walking around, figuring things out. It's like a wolf spider, jumping spider hybrid. It was intelligent. And that's not what I was expecting at all. Another spider that surprised me a lot in that same super deadly vein was the Sydney funnel web. Same thing. Everyone had said, oh, this is super aggressive, they're super nasty, horrible spiders. Not only did we find a Sydney funnel web, we found a male, which are supposed to be even more aggressive than the females. And it was the same thing. We were able to handle it. Now I wouldn't recommend anybody pick up a Sydney funnel web. It's really a bad idea. But we were able to handle it. It wasn't aggressive. It didn't show us any defensive behavior. It was just like any other spider. I think that's kind of the thing, is even the most dangerous ones, they're just spiders. And if we treat them like that, they're not going to act any different. This is not an endorsement to just go pick up dangerous spiders, but it's like a lot of people are afraid of these things. They see them in their house and they squish them. You know, it's like a smash first, ask questions later. They may look creepy, but they're just animals and they're just kind of trying to do their own thing. Even the most dangerous of them, it's the same story. That's kind of what surprised me going into those. It's cool.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

What do you know about the Sydney Funnel Web spider?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

He said he saw a boy one, right? So the Sydney Funnelweb is a medium-sized spider from Australia. And actually, we always talk about the Sydney Funnel Web, but the funnelwebs are an entire family of spiders from Australia, the atracidae. And they're all these sleek black megalomorph spiders, the primitive spider, different lineage than their wolf spiders and orb weavers. And they live in these kind of curtain-y funnel-shaped webs where they get their name. Most of the time, most people will never see them because they spend 90% of their time down inside burrows or in like little crevices and trees. But certain times of year, the males will actually come out and wander around to look for females. So it's only the males that usually leave their burrows. And that is where the opportunity for human-animal conflict is to occur. And basically what happens is they're out wandering actively and they find their way into your house or your garden, and you're not looking, you're not shaking your shoes out before you put them on, or you're gardening and you get bit, and it's a very bad bite. They're extremely neurotoxic. So their venom attacks your central nervous system, your brain, your spinal cord, like all the things that help you to move, to breathe, to control your heartbeat. And the venom of the funnel web particularly attacks the signaling pathway that controls your heartbeat. So you can be unconscious and maybe even dead within minutes of a funnel web bite just because of how the venom acts on your body and it's really, really, really toxic. They are often called the most venomous spider in the world. Depends on how you actually measure that. There's some argument there. Generally, we go off of lethal dose. So, like pure toxicity by weight is the best way to measure what is the most venomous thing. We use that metric for snakes, for insects, for jellyfish, for the poisons of dark frogs. So by that metric, the Brazilian wandering spider is the most venomous spider in the world. But the funnelweb has a high yield of venom when it bites, it injects a lot, and its venom is particularly toxic to primate systems. So monkeys, apes, humans, all primates. And the funnel web is really bad for us because it attacks that nerve system that controls the heartbeat. So when you're bitten, it is considered to be life-threatening. Get to the hospital immediately and get anti-venom. Because it could be a bad, bad time. Wow. Oh, that's pretty wild.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

What really makes a spider dangerous? It's venom, how it bites, or what people do.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Honestly, the most dangerous spider is the one that you're messing with. What people do is really what makes them dangerous. None of them seek people out. Even your most venomous, your most dangerous spiders, we're not food. They're spiders. They have no reason to seek us out. They're eating things that are usually smaller than them. Sometimes you'll get the occasional widow spider that's a little bit ambitious and catches a lizard or a snake, the baby snake. And even if they have venom that's powerful enough to kill us, it's more of a defensive thing than it is an offensive weapon. 90% or more of bites happen because you were like sticking your fingers somewhere you didn't see, and you just didn't see the spider, and then the other 10% are because you were actively messing or trying to kill a spider. None of them are biting because they're just mean. We don't go poking spiders, right? Nope.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

The worst thing you can do.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

It's Brad kind of not a good idea, right? Like, that's hi, are you a spider? That's my job. You go poke spiders. That's his job. Not you. You go.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Is a Brazilian wandering spider actually very dangerous? And why do people talk about it so much?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

It's dangerous if you're provoking it, but if you're just happen to be in an area where Brazilian wandering spiders live, it's really not any more dangerous than other spiders. I've worked specifically with Planutria depilata, which is the depilated wandering spider in both Panama and Ecuador. I have yet to actually work with the original Brazilian wandering spider, and there's two of those, there's Plenutria Fera in the Amazon and Planutria Nicriventor in like Brazil proper, both of which are the true most toxic of the wandering spiders, with a toxicity similar to that of like the golden arrow frog. Like it's one of the most potent toxins in the animal kingdom that they possess. But from what I've been able to see, the photos and video I've seen of those species online, they don't act significantly different than the species that I've worked with. And the one that I worked with, like I said, it was an inquisitive spider. They are very curious, so they might wind up in your house because they're just like investigating, like, oh, there's a structure here. There might be bugs in here for me to eat, or like small lizards, because they also eat lizards. And because they're curious, they're intelligent, they're gonna be actively wandering. They're gonna be kind of investigating and inspecting stuff. Yeah, they might wind up in your bed or your closet or cupboard where your stuff is. That's where, you know, nasty encounters happen. But generally speaking, like I said, if you never stick your fingers where you can't see, if you check your bed or whatever before you go to sleep, if you're living in those areas, there's no reason to ever like actually have one of those bad encounters because you'll find the spider or you'll see that there's no spider there when you stick your hand in somewhere and you'll be fine.

SPEAKER_02 7:19

When I was a little kid, my grandpa used to always tell us to check our boots. Because when he was a little kid, he didn't get bit by a spider, but he had a nice little centipede that gave him a nice little hello when he put his boot on.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

It went, Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 7:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Where was he from? He's from Arizona. Yep. So it probably what giant desert centipede? It was. It was. Yeah, that's a bad one. I've been bit by that. That's not a fun bite. It's not a fun bite. He told us he jumped out of his boots and across the room.

SPEAKER_02 7:44

And his foot probably didn't fit in his boot for about a week after that. Nope, it did not. It's a hardcore old cowboy guy, and he was in a sandal and a boot for a week.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

How do you decide when it's safe to work with a spider and when it's too risky?

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Great question. So that comes from a lot of testing and behavior analysis just in the field. I've had spiders bite me before when I wasn't expecting it, so I've kind of learned from those incidents. Like, oh, what was wrong with this particular encounter where I got bit and every other encounter that I've had where nothing happened? What was the difference? And so you start to learn like little cues of how they communicate their mood. So a little bit about spider anatomy. They have eight legs, there's these two little things in front that look kind of like legs, they're called pedi palps. They will kind of display their mood with their petty palps because those are sort of like their antennae, like an insect. And the more frantically they're moving those, the more stressed they are because they're trying to like get a lot of information really quickly. They're trying to understand their surroundings, whatever the situation is. They're like, I'm stressed, I'm agitated, and you can really see it in those. With certain spiders, like the megalomorphs, the primitive spiders, they actually wear their mood on their face really well. Tarantulas, funnel webs, trapdoor spiders, they're all megalomorphs. You know, they'll just stand up, they'll show usually their front fore legs, and then they'll raise their fangs, usually even do some flaring with them, like a snake almost. And with certain wolf spiders and stuff, sometimes they'll do a similar thing. Like their fangs look different. They go like this instead of like this, but they'll kind of like spread their fangs like this. You'll see them with this grumpy, like gape, and then they'll kind of do that same thing, they'll fold up their legs. They might even have some color, like colored banding underneath as like an extra like aposomatic threat warning. Compare them to like a cat, right? When a cat's agitated, their tail is really twitching all around. If you don't see any twitchy pedi palp movement, and they're just kind of slowly just doing these little taps to like figure things out, it's usually more inquisitive, usually more investigative. If they're not moving, like if they're not scaring or anything super erratically, we would say that's a spider that's not quite as stressed out, and usually it's safe to work with.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

I got to see a really stressed spider once. My wife was filming a music video. My wife is a singer, her mom, and we were in a recording studio or like a stage, and I got to meet my first giant huntsman spider here in Southeast Asia. It was it was this big across. It was like a dinner plate. I don't know if it was a giant huntsman. It was huge. It ran down the wall, across the hallway, and out the door in like two seconds. And I was like, I did not know spiders were that big. I didn't know they could run like that. It was like Hussein Bolt of spiders, man. It was so fast.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

I wonder if that was heteropoda maxima, because there's a really huge, huge huntsman that's found in like certain parts of Southeast Asia. Like, would you say close to 12 inches, like a third of a meter in leg span? Yep.

SPEAKER_02 10:26

Crazy long legs, and it just ran down the wall across the hallway. All I said was nope. I was like, what was that? I'm going this way.