SPIDER VENOM Can SAVE Your Life? | With My Wild Backyard | Ailani's Little World

Can spider venom actually help save lives? Today on Ailani’s Little World, we talk with Spencer from My Wild Backyard about redback spiders, mouse spiders, six-eyed sand spiders, and why scientists are so interested in spider venom!

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What can you tell us about the redback spider and how is it different from the other spiders?

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Redback Spider is the only widow spider native to Australia. It is often considered to be the most venomous by weight of the widow spiders, which does check out. It comes from some pretty arid regions of the Outback. It's originated, but then it's spread into more civilized areas. The redback spider and the eastern brown snake are two animals that are dangerous to humans that saw their range increase as Australia got more settled because they just do really well in human dwellings and human civilized areas. The redback is often considered to be deadly, but like with the Black Widow, we can't actually find any normal confirmed cases. I think there was one case where somebody got bit by like 20 and died. I don't know if it's actually true. I've heard it, but I don't know how that would happen. In the medical record, we can't actually find any confirmed kills. The bite is bad from the redback spider. It's a very unpleasant experience because the way their venom works is it's a neurotoxin, so it attacks your nerves. But unlike the Sydney funnel web, where it turns you off, like you can just kind of fall asleep and die, the redback turns on your nerves, so it's like lighting your body on fire. And basically what you feel is just intense muscle spasms because the same types of receptors that it turns on in your nerves are also in your muscles. So like you have all these little ions in your body that allow you to have almost like an electrical signaling pathways in your body, and the redback's venom takes advantage of that. Now, we used to think that it was for killing their prey quickly, but the active ingredient in redback venom that seems to be most effective against larger vertebrates, humans, mammals that might be raiding their nests, we actually think it might be a vertebrate-specific defense. So it was something that they evolved to defend themselves against larger things that were trying to eat them. And that also makes sense with their coloration, right? So the red hourglass, that red striped on their back, that's very bright, vibrant colors. And usually when we see that in nature, that's a warning. Hey, I'm very toxic, don't mess with me. All the widows have that hourglass, and that's because they sit upside down in their webs. But where their webs are at is usually under a rock. Always these little tucked away, like dry spaces. And so if something's rooting around in their habitat, they're gonna see that red hourglass popping right out at them, and it's gonna startle them, and they're gonna back off. And just like any other widow, the red back can do a couple other defenses before it bites. Usually they'll like spray web, they'll use their back two legs to kind of like kick really sticky globs of web at you. And widow web in general is one of the strongest silks in the spider world. They're basically like shooting goo version of it at you. So it's like super sticky, super strong, makes it very uncomfortable when it's on you. And if that's not enough to get you to back off, then and only then the spider will bite. And yeah, it's gonna be unpleasant. You're not gonna want to mess with the little black and red spider ever again if you survive that. The redback is just kind of like, it's just the most widow spider of the widow spiders, if that makes sense. It's like the most extreme one. But with that, the bright coloration you see, the venom and stuff, it's all just defenses that help keep it alive. It's not really trying to mess with people. And in my experience, the redback is probably one of the like more chill of the widows. They're a bit more inquisitive and exploratory, whereas some of them might be more skittish. That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Why is a spider venom interesting to scientists?

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Lots of reasons, and it really depends on the spider we're talking about. So you have neurotoxic spiders, some that are turning off nerves, and it's like, well, if it can turn off nerves in the human body, can we modify its structure to turn off pain? You have spiders that are turning on nerves. Can we use that? I want to say that there were a couple tarantulas, trapdoor spiders, and widow spiders that are being used to treat potentially chronic pain. I don't know where we were at in those clinical trials, but I've read a few times that those are being studied to see if we can't use spider venom for pain management with things like round recluses and seam spiders. I haven't seen this done yet, but I've personally been kind of like going down rabbit holes on how the recetotoxin works. It is a very, very effective cell-destroying toxin. And we use a lot of toxins similar to that in things like chemotherapy and other like tumor management, cancer treatment type therapies. We use snake venoms for stuff like that that work similarly. Why can't we use these even more destructive spider venoms, but just change their molecule structure a little bit better so they attack only certain cells versus any cell on their path? We could probably build some very effective treatments off of spider venoms. But yeah, it does depend on the spider. What is the venom doing? And the question we're always asking is like, can we use this? Can we modify this function a little bit and then use it for medicine? That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

What do we know about the mouse spider and the six-eyed science spider? And are they really, as they just as people say?

SPEAKER_03 5:00

So the mouse spider is another one of those little subterranean megalomorph spiders from Australia. But unlike the funnel webs, they also turn up in parts of South America. They're like a smaller, almost like a smaller version of the funnel web mixed with a trapdoor spider. So they tend to live in these, instead of these like funnel-y webs, they live in deep burrows with a trapdoor lid. But their evolutionary relationship with funnel webs is very close. And scientists call their lineage the venom clade because both of them have this weird primate-specific toxin that makes them more toxic to primates than to other animals. Now, the mouse spider is tiny compared to the funnel web. So, like I was saying earlier, dosage makes a big difference in a bite. So even your full tank from a mouse spider is gonna be a lot less venom than a big funnel web bite. So bites from mouse spiders are bad. They can be bad. Most are inconsequential because they're smaller spiders, but there are bite reports that have been confirmed to be from mouse spiders that were pretty gnarly. I don't think we have any confirmed kills to them. Funnel webs, we have a few, less than you'd think. In fact, from my research, I could only find, like, in medical record, around 50 confirmed kills from spiders ever. So, like, even the deadliest spiders are killing like a dozen people in history. Doesn't mean the bites aren't bad, but people aren't just dropping dead spider bites left and right. But the mouse spider I don't think is deadly. Now, the six-eyed sandspider, that refers to two different genera on two different continents and over a dozen different species. But there are two species that tend to be considered the worst, though. There's Sicarius thomasoides, that's the South American six-eyed sand spider found on the Pacific coast of like Peru, Chile, and then Namibia and parts of South Africa, you have Exophthuma honeye, which is the African six-eyed sand spider. We don't have any confirmed bite reports to them. We have two suspected bite cases. Suspected, meaning we didn't actually see the spider who bit the person. One of them lost their arm, the other one died. So we have two cases where someone was bitten by a six-eyed sand spider, potentially. One lost their arm, the other died. Venom studies, like when we actually looked at their venom, we've sequenced it, we know what's in it, what it's made of. It's basically like brown recluse venom on steroids. So to kind of put it in perspective, we have the main enzyme that makes brown recluse venom dangerous, it's called phospholipase D. Basically, what it does is it breaks down the membranes of cells. It just rips them open. And it's not very picky about it either. It just kind of destroys anything in its path. In certain species of brown recluse, it is much more active than others. So it's the same protein in your North American brown recluse and your Chilean recluse. But because of the different localities, one of them has a super high active fossil lipase, the other one has a super inactive fossil lipase. So your Chilean recluse, they were studied in the lab and they had the highest activity level of that venom of all the recluse spiders. But when we looked at the six-eyed sand spiders, Exopah Mahani and Sicarius thomasoides had the same activity level in a much bigger spider. So the Chilean recluse is probably about like that big. Tiny, tiny spider, like maybe the size of a quarter with its legs all the way out. The six-eyed sand spider would fit within a circle like that on my palm. So it's almost like 10 times the size of a chilan recluse with the same activity level of venom. So you can imagine when dosage is a big problem, right? Dosage is a very important consideration in a bite. You have a very destructive cell-popping enzyme, and you have a lot of that venom in a large spider that also happens to live in places that are very remote and very like underdeveloped. And you can kind of see what the problem is with that spider. So if you were to be bitten by that one, that's one of the only spiders that I would say is potentially a death sentence. All other ones are pretty manageable, but the six-eyed sand spider is bad. But the nice thing about them is the reason we have like no bite reports is they don't encounter people very often, but they're also very, very, very reluctant to bite. It was the scariest spider I've ever handled, because if something went wrong, you're just done. Don't handle them. Like don't handle them. But you can theoretically handle them because they're very, very chill. And the reason for that is they're living in some of the like driest regions on Earth. In the deserts of like Namibia and like the more arid parts of South Africa, it's super, super dry, very resource scarce. Weather found in South America is the Atacama Desert, which is the driest desert on Earth. Not I guess there's like one desert in like Antarctica that's technically drier based on precipitation, but it's like it's different. It's all frozen. In the main inhabited part of the world, the Atacama is the driest desert on Earth. There's like nothing there. Like there's parts of it that look like Mars. And these sand spiders are able to go sometimes months. I think the record was one of them went a year without eating. So their venom is so potent because they're not seeing food hardly ever. And they're not really wanting to use their venom on something that isn't food because again, resources are scarce and they don't want to waste that precious tool on something that isn't food when they don't know what their next meal is gonna be. So dangerous spider if you're bitten, but not a dangerous spider because it doesn't want to bite you. Which is kind of the theme with all the spiders.

SPEAKER_02 10:09

Has worry of spiders helped you be less afraid in life?

SPEAKER_03 10:13

Yeah, oh yeah. That's like a fun, like almost like a TED talk thing. Because I used to be a big arachnophobe, but I always liked bugs. So I was like, well, spiders are just bugs, basically. Not insects, but you know, they're all like little arthropods. So I was like, why am I so comfortable with like grasshoppers and katybids and beetles, but spiders freak me out. And so I just forced myself to like handle a lot of spiders in my yard until I got over it. And it was weird how that like thing that I was so afraid of became a focus of fascination. I'm like, wow, these are actually not that scary. And not only that, they're actually pretty interesting compared to many of the like garden variety insects and stuff. There's so much diversity in the spider group and in arachnids in general, it kind of opened up the world a little bit for me. So it kind of became one of the missions of my channel is how can I use these really scary creatures to show people that reality is stranger than fiction? Because I've always liked science fiction and fantasy and stuff, and for me, insects and reptiles and stuff, they're just weird. They're weird because they're so different than we are. And they were kind of my way of getting that like science fiction fantasy fix in my backyard. And spiders were sort of the next level up because they're like science fiction, fantasy, and horror. And there's a little bit of that like adrenaline junkie kind of thing of like working with some of the scary and like dangerous animals, but it's also like, man, it's kind of cool that you have these weird little animals that they're living, breathing things like us, they're earthlings too, and yet they're so different than us. It just starts to like generate this cascade of questions in your brain, like, well, what else could work? What else could be real? The next thing you know, you're just out looking for stuff and learning in real time with your hands about the world around you. So to me, I think those things that scare you, whether it's spiders, whether it's heights, whether it's the dark, even those random things that we're afraid of for no reason. When we actually like confront those fears, I don't know if you're a big Star Wars fans or not, but like it was this sort of like a Jedi teaching, right? It's not that a Jedi doesn't feel fear, but he doesn't let the fear be a master of himself. It's only through confronting that fear that you can become like a Jedi master. So it's sort of like that same principle. I had like a weird, not phobia, but I got in a bad car accident on one of my production trips. And for a long time I was like super paranoid about driving a long distance. And then a trip came up where I was going back to Florida where I got in the car accident. And I'm like, you know what? I need to just bite the bullet and do this trip and drive the whole thing and just like show myself that I'm fine in that same kind of vein. Like, even when you develop a fear because something bad happens, confronting that fear again and seeing the other side of it, it just opens up the world for you. Well, where can people learn more about your channel and go find you and what you do? So, well, my YouTube channel is My Wild Backyard, and I actually have recently started a streaming series on Nebula. So nebula.tv slash my wild backyard is where I'm releasing like a new premium show as well, documenting my adventures, looking for some of the more legendary and rare animals of the world. Sometimes I have projects going, like I'm looking for something for like three years to try and film it and like do it real justice on camera. But yeah, just find me on YouTube, find me on Nebula, and hopefully it'll be an interesting and entertaining experience. Well, thank you for coming on my lobby's little world, man. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, glad to be here. Definitely appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Thank you everybody for watching.

SPEAKER_03 13:32

We'll see you guys next time.