Carrion Luggage

What You Eight Last Night

I covered our eight-legged friends in an entry recently: "What a Tangled Web" . This is a different spider-written article from SciAm:

    Do People Really Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While They Sleep?  
Should we worry about arachnids crawling into our mouths while we’re in dreamland?

Sure, go ahead. Worry about that. It's not like there's enough other stuff to worry about.

Rod Crawford has heard plenty of firsthand accounts of spider-swilling slumberers. “Once or twice a year, someone tells me they once recovered a spider leg in their mouth,” says Crawford, the arachnid curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

Yes, this is the same Rod Crawford (actually a spider in a trenchcoat and hat) who got quoted in the previous entry.

Luckily for all of us, the “fact” that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close.

Yeah, it's more like eighty.

Okay, yes, I'm kidding. But if you think it's "luckily for all of us," just think how much luckier it is for the spiders.

Three or four spider species live in most North American homes, and they all tend to be found either tending their webs or hunting in nonhuman-infested areas.

I'd say it's more like thirty or forty.

Okay, I'm kidding again.

During their forays, they usually don’t intentionally crawl into a bed because it offers no prey (unless it has bed bugs, in which case that person has bigger problems).

Problems that can be solved by introducing spiders.

Plus, many people would likely be awakened by the sensation of a spider crawling over their faces and into their mouths.

Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night.

Spider experts concede that a sleeping person could plausibly swallow a spider, but “it would be a strictly random event.”

Given that we swallow a lot less while sleeping, and we sleep only about 1/3 of the time, I think it's far more likely to swallow one while awake.

If this article doesn't put your nocturnal arachnophobia to rest, consider this: other arthropods don't have the same fear of us that spiders do. It's far more likely that you've swallowed a cockroach.