This is the most frightening spider statistic ever: spiders walk across our faces as we sleep!

[NWCorona]

The thought of being in the same room as a spider gives most of us the creeps - so imagine finding out they also walk across our faces as we sleep!

“Huntsmen can walk across you and you wouldn’t know,” Michael Tate from NSW’s Central Coast Australian Reptile Park told 2UE radio.

“By the time you’re 35 years old, and if you’re living in Sydney, several huntsmen will have walked across your face during your sleep,” Tate said, who is more commonly known as ‘Ranger Mick’.

You’re not alone if hearing this makes you want to jump out of your skin and sleep wrapped in bubble wrap!

“It’s very likely that someone may have had prey caught on their face by a huntsman. Bushy eyebrows are the perfect hunting ground for a spider,” he said."

But it gets worse...


"according to arachnid curator Rod Crawford of Seattle’s Burke Museum, we swallow eight spiders a year in our sleep, he told Scientific American."


https://au.be.yahoo.com/lifestyle/real-life/a/32563209/this-is-the-most-frightening-spider-statistic-ever/#page1

[jberryhill]

1. "we swallow eight spiders a year"

Well, duh, how else are we supposed to catch the flies?

[NWCorona]

2. Lol!

[RockaFowler]

3. Now that song will be an earworm for the day

Thanks a lot!

[Krytan11c]

15. Perhaps we'll die.

I heard it happened to an old lady once.

[longship]

18. The King, the Mice and the Cheese!

Read it. Great for all ages.

[tymorial]

4. I could have sworn that the swallowing spider myth

Was just that. An urban legend. How does one even measure that statistic?

[NWCorona]

6. Truthfully. I don't want to know how they find that out. nt

[pintobean]

17. How often do you dream about eating crab?

I do about eight times a year.

[tymorial]

35. I am more of a lobster man myself

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

29. Yep, it is a complete and total bullshit myth.

Here's the link to the Snopes article: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.asp

[geek tragedy]

5. Not in North America

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-people-swallow-8-spiders-a-year-while-they-sleep1/

[NWCorona]

8. Yes. It's Australia but still.... Spiders still do the same here in the states

Just not as frequently as down under

[geek tragedy]

10. Huntsmen spiders are unusual spiders and are rarely encountered in the USA nt

[NWCorona]

12. I'm talking spiders in general not huntsmen in particular.

[geek tragedy]

16. Regular spiders would have no reason to crawl on a human being

They are stationary hunters

[A HERETIC I AM]

22. What if it's a man about town spider.?

[Eleanors38]

32. Regular spiders can't stand the geyser of bad breath that bellows up in their journeys.

[hunter]

39. I see them here in California, occasionally in our house.

Them, and tarantulas do not get to live in our house, I put them outside and usually don't see them again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsman_spider

The tarantulas are easy to catch, the huntsmen are wickedly fast, you've got to sneak up on them or get them cornered somewhere.

[Skinner]

9. Thanks.

I was skeptical.

[MowCowWhoHow III]

7. N.O.P.E.

[NWCorona]

13. Hell no!

[KittyWampus]

11. What's worse than finding a worm in your apple?

>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>


FINDING HALF A WORM IN YOUR APPLE.


I have a huge veggie garden and fruit tree/bushes. Occasionally realizing you just ate an aphid or whatever doesn't phase me.

Especially when you turn over a grub and realize they look pretty much like the shrimp you had last night.

[NWCorona]

14. Definitely worse!

[woodsprite]

19. I find spiders fascinating, but I do have a phobia of them.

Walked out on our porch last night and walked smack dab into a web that stretched from the porch ceiling to the floor. The diameter of the woven area was about 24". Somehow I managed to avoid the spider when I ran into it. Good thing too, because she was about 2" counting her legs. Thankfully she wasn't sitting in the center, but off to the side - otherwise, spider in the face.

I felt creepy the rest of the night.

[Laffy Kat]

25. Probably an orb weaver.

They build giant webs at night and love porches and door frames. I had one for weeks outside my side porch last year. She would spend an entire night building these enormous, perfect, beautiful webs and then tear them down and built another. I could only see her at night and I got really attached to her. I was so proud of her I would always bring my house guests out to see her work. Unfortunately this year, nothing.

[woodsprite]

30. Charlotte's Web was always my favorite book when I was growing up.

The one I almost ran into last night was what I call a "Charlotte" - light brown and darker brown with stripy legs. We live in the woods and see tons of wolf spiders and grass spiders, but it's not often we see a large orb weaver. Boy, did she make a large shadow on our ceiling! I've seen the garden orb weavers (pretty black and yellow) but the ones I've seen around our house have been tiny (1/4" to 1/2" body). There was a huge one (body about 1.5" long) happily captive inside a large light fixture by our church. It was awesome, my family would just sit there and watch her wrap up her latest conquest. I guess meals would fly into the fixture attracted by the light and get trapped, then as they were bouncing around trying to get out, they would be caught in her web.

The oddest spider I've ever seen was what I called a "spikey butt spider" when I was a kid (over 40 yrs ago). Now that we're in the woods, I see quite a few of them. Always in the same spot -- building webs between my hosta plants.

Oh, and my daughter was out with the dog one night and got really excited because she saw (and photographed) a trap door spider in our front yard. I didn't even think we had those in Delaware, but a Google search proved me wrong.

[Laffy Kat]

38. They are fascinating. Creepy, but fascinating.

When I was in the fifth grade I got be Charlotte in our class play!

[lame54]

20. Still better than vegemite

[yeoman6987]

26. 100 percent correct!

[randome]

21. Best to keep a gun under the pillow, then.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

[A HERETIC I AM]

23. Careful you don't blow your nose off n/t

[Eleanors38]

33. That 's a myth.Thirty-eights are for Florida cock roaches.

[Laffy Kat]

24. I remember eating a spider in my sleep.

Didn't know that's what it was at the time. I remember dreaming that I was chewing something that tasted strange and awful and the taste stayed with me after I woke up, like ALL DAY. At the time I was renting an apartment in a darling old Victorian that had a lot of spiders. Figured it out years later and now I'm certain.

[relayerbob]

27. Spiders are our friends

Without spiders, we'd be overrun by really nasty critters.

[eissa]

28. Happened to me

I was in my teens. Woke up one morning to get ready for school, walked into the bathroom and noticed a weird face in the mirror. My upper lip was gone and my face looked like a blowfish. Doctor said it was most likely a spider bite while I slept. Had to take antibiotics to get my face back to normal, but that took several days, and my mom still made me go to school looking like that. I was mortified!

[Nuclear Unicorn]

31. Because the clowns hiding under our beds aren't bad enough.

Oh, and -- http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018787687

[HuckleB]

34. Sounds like some reassuring information.

In other words, we should stop being so fearful of spiders.

[canetoad]

36. I'm pretty fond of huntsmen

or huntswomen, as most of them are, and usually have one or more living around the cornices.

They are pretty amazing creatures. Being big, juicy targets for birds, humans and reptiles and having virtually no defences, they have evolved to be able to flatten themselves to 1 or 2 mm thick. Their leg joints can swivel both up and down and sideways, like a crab, enabling them to hide under bark, wallpaper, car sun visors - anywhere there is a tiny flat space.

You can tell a male from female - the males generally have smaller bodies and longer legs than the females who appear to be 'chunkier'. When a hunstperson appears in my house, it usually stays up high for a week or so, but if you are patient, they nearly always come down to eye level where they can be caught with a (large) glass and piece of card and re-homed outside.

[Initech]

37. Hasn't this been proven false like 1,000,000 times now?