This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 219 The Brown Recluse: Fearsome foe or slandered spider?

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Few spiders hold the dubious honor of name recognition among the general public. Most that do, like black widows, Australian funnel-web, the Goliath birdeater, are renowned not for their cute colors or weaving skills but for being fearsome, dangerous predators. The brown recluse is no exception. A bite from one of these arachnids can send someone to the hospital with a painful necrotizing wound and weeks of recovery. But do these spiders actually deserve all the hatred they get? In this week’s episode, we argue no. Breaking down not just the bite of thebrown recluse but also its behaviors, its distribution, and its lore, we present a more complete picture of this vilified arachnid. Tune in for the low down on this shy spider. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The third way. I'm Jake Brennan. And on my podcast, Hollywoodland, I revisit some of the biggest stories from Hollywood history, separating the myths people want to believe from the reality. Meatham. Hollywoodland is part of the Exactly Right Network. Listen to new episodes every Monday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Miss CS, age 24, entered the hospital because of a spider bite on the ulnar side of the right elbow and a rash over the entire body with the exception of the face.

She stated that while riding in an automobile, November 5th, 1928, she suddenly felt a sticking sensation on her right elbow. She removed her coat, ran her hand into the sleeve, and with, withdrew a small object which dropped to the floor of the car and which, when recovered, was found to be a rather small, tan, spider. Her arm began to pain at once, the pain becoming progressively worse. On returning home, an hour later, she examined her arm and found a dark red spot surrounded by an area of pallor. She slept well until 3 a.m. without a sedative, when she awakened with pain in her right arm and a generalized rash, which was most pronounced on the abdomen and back. Her arm, at this time, was aching and had swollen somewhat.

The next day, the swelling was very pronounced. Four days later, the rash seemed to be fading, but the following day, it was as bad as before. Before entering the hospital, the patient had a rapid pulse, but her temperature reaction was mild, never much over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. She entered the hospital five days after having been bitten. The patient was anxious and restless. The arms, legs, abdomen, and chest were covered with a scarletina form rash with a few small pushtules on the legs. On the inner surface of the right elbow was found a small reddened area with a yellow center, resembling a small puschule. The area around the elbow was

swollen and tender. The entire abrasion was not more than one-fourth inch in diameter. The treatment was essentially palliative, consisting of sedatives internally and starch and sodium-bicarbid baths. A solution of 0.5% lead acetate was used in wet packs applied to the area of the bite. The spider was identified by Professor C. R. C. R. Crosby of Cornell University as the specimens of Loxicelli's refesens, a species usually found in Texas, Florida, Mexico, Costa Rica, Europe, and Japan. As yet, little reference has been made in the literature regarding its toxicity. So far as my search of the literature enables me to judge, no case of poisoning from its bite has been reported from this region. Well, well, well, well, well. How about it? How about that, Aaron? That was excerpted from a paper in 1929.

Okay. By the, by a doctor L.F. Schmouse. Okay. And it's called case of arachnoidism, spider bite. Spiteiteiteite. And this is what a lot of papers point to as the first likely reported scientific, like, clinical case study of a bite from a brown recluse. And if you are a spider nerd and you heard the scientific name in the firsthand, Loxicell is refesans. That, I think, is what it initially was called before they changed it to reclusa.

I don't know the time. I know. There's also, there's another species. that's like the Mediterranean recluse that's like refusins now today. So like who knows which species it actually was at the time. Right. Right. They're similar. But yeah.

Yeah. There you go. There we go. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And I'm Aaron Alman Updike. And this is, this podcast will kill you. Today we're talking brown recluse bites. We are.

I'm really excited about this, actually, Aaron. Me too. It's so interesting. how large the fear looms in many places. And infamous, I think, is like... That's the correct, I think. Yeah. That's a correct.

And, like, I can't wait to tell everyone how undeserved the infamy really is. We're going to dispel some myths here. We're going to try to do a little bit of, like, reputational rehab for these spiders. Exactly. But also acknowledge that, like, you know, as you will learn, the bite can be quite gnarly. It can be bad. Yeah. It can be bad.

But there's a lot to cover. I'm really excited. We should finish our intro. Exactly. First up, it's quarantini time. It is. This week we are drinking a tangled web. A tangled web.

Yeah. It is. Hold on. I wrote in my notes because we picked this out. Cherry juice, lime juice, soda water, and mereshinos cherry syrup. A little bit reddish, a little bit bloody maybe. Sure. Sure.

Yeah. It's delicious. It's refreshing. You know, check it out. The full recipe on our website, this podcast will kill you.com and on all of our social media channels. So make sure that you're following us there if you're not already. Yes. Website has lots of good resources, including actual resources for our each episode, transcripts, links to various things like music by Bloodmobile, bookshop, etc.

You know, check it out for all of your, this podcast will kill you needs. rate review and subscribe. We'd like to remind you. Shall we get into this? Let's do it. I've got this quick break. Experience with Cameron Wickcombe. Live at the Rhyman.

You and a pal with flights and two nights in Nashville. To see Cameron Wickcombe at the legendary Riemann Auditorium. Plus a thousand dollar spending cash. Just listen to Pure Country for 10 minutes a day on the free IHart Radio app in your in to win. Cameron Wickham. Stream the new single, Kingdom of Fear. Available now.

Betrayal Weekly is back, with brand new stories. From threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages? Why did it start with us? To long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick? This was the last time I ever believed a word she said.

New voices. each with the courage to tell their own story. He said I have been kidnapped. Okay, just trying at normal. He was essentially on the run. Every family has secrets. The rug had been pulled from underneath me. Oh my God.

It was right in front of my face and I didn't even see it. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Chelsea Handler from Dear Cherokee. Chelsea, this season, we've got some awesome guests ready to dole out advice. Guests like Tiffany Haddish. Kind of slide into people's DMs. I like Bumble. Also, girl, Farmers Only.com.

At state sales, funerals, auctions are usually good. There's a lot of good men there. Grocery stores near gyms. Darcy Cardin. I remember being like, I know this is good advice, but like, I really don't want to do that. So you didn't take her advice? I didn't take her advice. Are you still friends with that woman?

No. She actually was kind of toxic. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I spent my whole life looking up. I was a geek kid. I had a telescope at age 12. So you didn't have sex for a long time. Sherry O'Terry.

Were you a soap opera person? Young and restless. Okay. Well, first of all, you should know it's the young and the restless. I can't even believe you're mispronancing the title. Some of us abbreviated because we've been so weird for so many years. T.S. Madison.

Are you into Polly? No, no. I don't think so. I could have told you no on that. Girl, why do you not? It's a polly. Just based on what she's wearing and the way her hair is styled. She was not in a polly.

Girl, try polly. Anna Ferris, Dave Franco, Madeline Kline, Hannah Gadsby, Adam Scott, Wanda Sykes, and more. Listen to Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So today's episode is not about all spiders. by any means, because spiders are incredibly varied. There are somewhere between 40 and 50,000 species that we know of and probably another 90,000 species we have yet to discover or name. And they exist in every ecosystem on the planet except for Antarctica, et cetera. But what we are talking about today is one specific spider, which is the brown recluse, loxosceles recluse.

Now, this is one of a handful, literally just a handful, of spiders that are considered medically important. In fact, there are at least 100 related species of loxicelli's. Many of the venoms of these different loxicelli species all act very similar. So I'm going to focus on the brown recluse today because this is like one of the most infamous spiders aside from the Black Widow. Black Widow, which I couldn't remember. the name of real quick. In the U.S., I feel like the Black Widow is like the most famous, and then the Brown Reclose is also the most famous. I feel like they're equal. Sure. I don't know. I have no. I don't have a statistic on that. Yeah. But the Brown Reclose is

actually not found in very much of this country. It's really only found across the South Central U.S. from like the lower Midwest, like halfway through Illinois, and then down into the Gulf. It goes as far east as like Tennessee and then as far west as like just to the edge of Texas, kind of. Yeah. It's like not quite in Colorado, for example. No, it's not the very edge. Yeah. It's not here in California.

There are a few other species in the U.S. One that is called Loxicelli's Deserta that is in like Arizona, New Mexico, and a little bit of California. And there are a number of other species of, again, medical importance throughout. Central and South America, including Laxicelli's Intermedia, Gautio, Latia, and Refucens, which is actually the Mediterranean spider that has been invasive in a number of areas as well. So all of these recluse species are these kind of smallish brown spiders. There may be like one to two centimeters in total, including their legs. Some of the older ones could get up to like three centimeters. So they're really not large.

That's very small, yeah. Yeah. I think we're going to have to find some pictures to post of these, too. So we will. We will. But their legs are very long and slender. Yeah. And they don't have one of those real globe-like abdomens that we see in Black Widows.

Their abdomen is a bit more elongated. And their whole body, the cephalothorax, the top part and the abdomen, they're quite a bit flatter than other, like, real hefty-looking spiders. and they tend to sit with their legs quite outright. They're not all bent up. And that's because they like to hide in teeny tiny little cracks and crevices. So they're really a flatter spider than some big, like, you know. Right.

Tarantula-looking guys. Right, exactly. They can vary in color from a lightish, yellowy brown to almost a gray. Or as they get older, they darken, which I think is really interesting. so they can be quite dark brown if they're an older spider. Yeah. And they're very famous for having this so-called violin pattern on their cephalothorax. Or fiddle.

Or fiddle. A violin or a fiddleback spider. So they're often called violin or fiddleback spiders. I don't see a violin as hard as I try. In theory, it's like the neck of the violin points towards their abdomen and the body of it is towards their head. I don't think it looks like a violin at all. And there's plenty of other spiders that have similar. similar violin patterns. So really, that's not a good way to identify them. What is a good way to

identify them is that, number one, their abdomen and their legs are one color. They don't have patterns on their abdomen or on their legs. So if you see a spider that has a pattern on their belly or their legs have speckles and splotches, that's not a run recluse. And they have six eyes. I have that as a fun fact. So fun. And they're arranged in three pairs. So they have these two in the middle, and then two on either side. It's kind of cute and ridiculous looking. And so that's how you can kind of identify them.

They make webs like pretty much most spiders, but they don't make those beautiful, like Charlotte's web kind of webs, like you think of. Orb weavery types. In fact, they make these really tangled, mish-mush sheet webs that they use to just kind of cover little cracks in bark or under rocks or holes in the ground or maybe in a pile of lumber in your backyard or bookshelf or under your bed or your basement whatever it is and they can live for a number of years that's another of my fun facts i'm gonna have nothing to talk about i won't say anything more okay no no they let's okay you can keep going that's literally all

i have erin that's the spiders themselves okay So the most important thing about spiders for humans is that they make venom. All spiders make venom. And the last time that we talked about venom was in our snake venom episode. Wow, yeah. A really long time ago. We need to do more venoms. I know.

And to distinguish a venom from a poison, which I feel like is important, a poison is a toxic substance that's produced in nature. so by a plant or an animal that usually can produce symptoms via any kind of contact. So contact with mucous membranes or via ingestion. Whereas a venom is a specific type of poison that is delivered via this specialized system where it has to be injected. Most venoms are used either for prey capture or as self-defense. Yeah. And while all spiders have venom and venoms are by no means unique to spiders. or even arthropods, lots of animals make venoms.

Spider venom is really interesting because it can vary really widely across the spiders, all spiders. Yeah. But in all of them, they're housed in this specialized pair of appendages called the chaliceroy, which I think are very cute.

And they're basically, they, I think people think of them as the fangs because it's what sticks out from a spider's little face. Yeah. But if you think of like your hand as the actual cheliscery. And then your fingers are the fangs.

Fangs sit tucked up underneath their chaliceroa. And then the venom glands are located in the chalicesterae. They have a duct that goes down to the tip of the fang. And they're surrounded by muscles and nerves. So the spider can actually control how much venom it releases with each bite or whether it releases any venom at all. Interesting. And so basically when a spider is ready to, it flicks its fangs out. and then stabs them in and then releases whatever type, whatever mixture of whatever amount of venom they decide to do.

What are the fangs made of? Oh, I don't know. Cighton? I don't know. I know just like, is it specialized Cighton? Like, why, you know, how do they actually penetrate human skin, for instance? Yeah. You know, does it?

And, yeah. That's a great question. I don't know. I didn't look that much into detail of it. Most, I mean, spider exoskeletons in general and made them mostly chitin. So I imagine it's just like a specialized extra hardened kitten. They do have to be large enough in diameter and sharp enough to be able to penetrate human skin. Most spiders, their fangs are not sharp enough or large enough to penetrate human skin.

Which is, it is, and this is where I didn't even get in. I didn't look into this at all, but it's interesting to think about like brown recluse spiders being quite little. Yes. Why do they have fangs that are capable of this? I can do that. Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah, I don't have an answer for that. Little beat bops.

I mean, black widows are real small too. Yeah, they are. Yeah. So I don't know. Huh. But then similarly sized or larger spiders don't. Don't necessarily. Yeah.

Or maybe their venom is just not as potent. Or their venom is not as potent. Right? Even if their bite can penetrate. There are spider bites, yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about the venom of the brown recluse, shall we? Let's do it.

It is a lot. Like there are a lot of different. enzymes contained in this venom. It is not just one thing. But the most important of which we think for human, like the kinds of symptoms that we see from a human bite, is called sphingomyelanase D, which is just one type of enzyme. But what it does is it attaches to our cell membranes, especially on our red blood cells, but also on like our endothelial cells. So that's the cells that line our blood vessels and lots of other cells kind of indiscriminately. And what it does is disintegrate these cell membranes. So it causes our cells to lice and break open. Not great.

Not great. And that in our body is going to cause the release of a huge amount of inflammatory markers, right? It's going to stimulate our immune system because we're like, why are our cells breaking open? It's also going to trigger our clotting cascade, which see our hemophilia episode for all the details on that. Like four or five years ago, who knows how long? If not more. And so what this means is that things like our red blood cells are being hemoized. They're breaking open.

The stuff that's in our red blood cells are spilling out. And our clotting cascade is being activated. And so this can cause both bleeding and a coagulopathy. So blood clots that can form. So then what we can see is surrounding the area of the biocampus, of the bite where this venom has penetrated, we can see tissue death or necrosis. And as this venom diffuses through our bloodstream, we can see more serious symptoms depending on kind of how far it goes and how rampant the immune response really is. And does that depend on location of bite? It's such a good

question. It probably depends on a lot of different things. The location of the bite, how much venom was injected or whether venom was injected at all. And I tried to get a sense of like how much venom does a spider bite give you? And I couldn't. I don't know if you found that anywhere. I found one paper that said that the approximate amount of venom per bite was 2,000 nanograms. But the citation on that was like a personal communication with some dude who raises spiders. Also like that number has no meaning. It has no meaning. Exactly. Like how many milliliters? I don't know. I have no idea. It's a very, very small amount, right? This is a teeny spider. It's injecting a very small amount, but it's very potent venom, right? So it's going to depend probably on the amount on the location, on the age of the person.

So kids seem to be more adversely affected than adults when they get bitten. And then probably other things too, especially when we talk more about the symptoms, if you have something like diabetes, that's going to delay your wound healing to begin with. So there's going to be a lot of individual factors that play into how bad this bite ends up being. And the thing is that as scary as that venom sounds, right, this venom is diffusing into the. your skin and blood vessels and disintegrating cells as it goes. Right. It sounds pretty bad. Just leaving a trail of destruction.

Right. You are so unlikely to be exposed to this venom. Yeah. Because first of all, these spiders are nocturnal. They're not out and about wandering around when we are. They're holed up in teeny tiny cracks and crevices. They are not aggressive spiders. They're really not.

They're called recluse for a reason. Right? They are really not aggressive. Like there are spiders in Australia that will chase you around the room or like rear up and attack you. And these spiders really don't. They really, really try to avoid contact with you. And they will bite you if they are, for example, wrapped up in your summer towels that you finally take out and then wrap yourself around in. And they get squished between you and a towel.

Those are the kinds of situations that they bite within. Yeah. Despite their quiet nature, their venom can pack quite a punch. So it's often called necrotic arachnidism or gangrenocutaneous arachnism or even loxocelism. Yeah, I've seen that a lot. When you get envenomated by a brown recluse. And most of the literature kind of splits the array of symptoms that we can have into four kind of categories. One is no symptoms at all.

one is minor injury. I guess that's number two. Three is like a slightly worse skin lesion that may leave a scar. And then finally, you can have systemic symptoms. So we can kind of go through all of those. Often, the bite itself is not necessarily painful, which can mean that it's hard to know right away if you got bitten. You don't necessarily feel the moment that those fangs puncture your skin.

But usually within a few hours of a bite, you might see redness or swelling and you might have a kind of burning pain or itching, not dissimilar to any other like insect bite really. And then at some time over the next few hours or a couple of days, you might see a central area of kind of necrotic tissue or this dead kind of tissue that starts to develop. Yeah. It might look just like a kind of duskier color that doesn't necessarily look like dead skin. It's just sort of like a duskier color with like a reddish ring around it. Or it could look like kind of a blood blister in the center. These are all Googlerable pictures, if you would like to see for yourself.

Although so many pictures on Google are like probably not actually a brown recluse bite. Well, yeah, that is also the story of brown recluse. And then this can progress to basically like a necrotic area of tissue that's usually really well defined and then surrounded by redness, which depending on the area could spread like a good ways up, say, your arm or something over the course of a few days, or it might just be right around where that wound is. And even though this can result in an ulcer that eventually kind of sluffs off and takes quite some time to heal, it generally will heal on its own, even without any major medical interventions. And I think it's easy for us to hear the word

necrotic tissue and think that's really bad. I'm going to need surgery, et cetera. But it's usually just the first couple of layers of skin and that like a little bit of dermis that gets affected. And so this usually heals completely on its own. It's interesting. I was going to ask about like which proportion, you know, how do all bites fall into these different categories of no, you know, minor wound, etc. But I would imagine that it's really difficult to get accurate numbers given how many bites are misdiagnosed? How many wounds are misdiagnosed as brown recluse bites? Yes.

The number that I saw over and over in the literature, and I don't know how they came up with this, but they said that 90% of the time, there's like no need for medical intervention at all. So it's only 10% of the time that a bite from a brown recluse would need some kind of medical intervention. And even that doesn't necessarily mean it's severe. It might just mean wound care, right?

Yeah, yeah. There can be more systemic symptoms, like was described in our firsthand account, this like generalized rash, this like red splotchy little, little bumpy kind of rash that almost looks like an allergic reaction or something, even that is usually self-limited. So even that you usually don't necessarily need to seek medical care or people don't need a lot of medical intervention. However, there can be more severe systemic symptoms from a brown recluse bite.

As this venom diffuses through the bloodstream and causes this immune system activation and the hemalysis, the breaking open of our red blood cells, we can start to see signs like fevers, chills, nausea or vomiting. People might show signs like jaundice and dark urine, which means like massive level hemalysis or red blood cells breaking open. And that eventually can lead to renal damage. So kidney failure, even cardiovascular failure, like edema in your lungs, which makes it really hard to breathe.

And this can, in the literature, it says lead to death. However, has it? We don't really know because there were eight reported deaths in the U.S. that were attributed to Brown Reclose Bites

between 1983 and 2004. None of these were actually confirmed by spider identification. So there are reports in the literature of Brown Reclose Bites being fatal, but I couldn't find any

that were like really, really confirmed that there was a brown recluse. Either we saw a bite or there was a spider recovered shortly after these symptoms started and that spider was identified to be a brown recluse. Right. So it's a little unclear if those systemic symptoms really were from a brown recluse bite or not. And that's the thing that makes this so hard. Yeah. It's really hard to definitively diagnose a brown recluse bite. Or any kind of spider bite. Any spider bite. Without having, and like you want to make the right diagnosis. Right. But how do you do that? How do you do that? And technically, to actually diagnose a spider bite properly, you have to save the spider, so you have to have the

spider with you. That spider needs to be identified by somebody who actually has some degree of expertise in identifying spiders because us as the general public are really not good at it. There's some interesting papers about people sending in brown recluse's. Most of them are not brown recluse's. And a lot of times you might not feel the bite initially. So if you didn't witness the spider bite or if you didn't find a spider very close to you or like in your bed when you woke up with a bite or something like that, it's really hard to directly connect those two things. And there are so many other conditions that can mimic these bites. My gosh, so many. A staff infection, a strep infection, cutaneous anthrax, a vasculitis, some kinds of cancers, atypical bacterial infections, diabetic ulcers, septic embolitis.

other bites and venom stings from other kinds of insects. The list really does go on. And brown recluses are not ubiquitous across this country. So they're often diagnosed in areas that they don't even actually exist, which is wild to me. Yeah. Yeah. But because we don't learn the distribution of spider species in med school. So just saying it. Right. You just learned about brown recluse bite.

Brown recluse bite. And so you see a thing and you're like, and someone comes in and says, I think. think this was a spider bite. Spider bite, yeah. Right? So they're really hard to diagnose. We also don't have any like specific treatment or any specific diagnostics to be like, can I identify brown recluse venom in your blood?

We don't have that. Yeah. And there's really no consensus on how we actually treat this. So it's really just depending on what someone's symptoms are, what you're going to do to treat it, which I think is interesting too. Okay, let's say that you have some sort of necrotic skin lesion. Mm-hmm. Does your course of treatment differ based on whether that's caused by a spider bite versus something else?

I mean, yes, it could. It could. But like, it is kind of interesting, like how, I don't know, like does it? Right. When would you, I mean, maybe if it's like Mersa, you're using antibiotics and stuff like that. Exactly. I think that's the biggest thing is like whether we need to use antibiotics, if it's just a spiderbite, you probably don't. But it might really look like something that you would want to use antibiotics for.

So it is, it is, it's one of those that just is going to need monitoring, right? Right. Right. Yeah. Did you see anything about immunity? I did not. Did you? I did.

I mean, only minorly, and I don't know if I actually wrote it down anywhere, but there was a study that looked at exposure to, like, of rabbits to spider bites, multiple spider bites. Okay. And so they did say like, okay, yes, this can kill a rabbit. Yes. But. We have a lot of good animal studies on the effects of the venom in animals. Yeah. But then they also said that those rabbits that did not die from the spider bite then reexposed

tended to have less severe reactions. Oh, that's so interesting. But it was also like it was not, I don't think this was a recent paper. And I don't think this was like a super, it was just sort of like discussed. So I don't know the degree of immunity or like whether that was demonstrated clearly or just suggested. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. Well, Erin, that's brown recluses.

Can you tell me about these spiders? And our long, I assume it's a long history with these. Although, I don't know. What is it? You know, that's a great question. Let's see what we can find out. Radio experience with Cameron Wickham. Live at the Riemann.

You and a pal with flights and two nights in Nashville. To see Cameron Wickham at the legendary Riemann Auditorium. Plus, a thousand. spending cash. Just listen to Pure Country for 10 minutes a day on the free IHart Radio app and you're in to win. Cameron Wilcom. Stream the new single Kingdom of Fear.

Available now. Betrayal Weekly is back with brand new stories from threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages? Why did it start with us? to long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick?

This was the last time I ever believed a word she said. New voices, each with the courage to tell their own story. He said I have been kidnapped. Okay, just trying at normal. He was essentially on the run. Every family has secrets. The rug had been pulled from underneath me. Oh my God.

It was right in front of my face and I didn't even see it. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. This season, we've got some awesome guests ready to dole out advice. Guests like Tiffany Haddish. Kind of slide into people's DMs. I like Bumble. Also, girl, Farmers Only.com.

Estate sales, funerals, auctions are usually good. There's a lot of good men there. Grocery stores near gyms. I remember being like, I know this is good advice, but like, I really don't want to do that. So you didn't take her advice? I didn't take her advice. Are you still friends with that woman? No.

She actually was kind of toxic. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I spent my whole life looking up. I was a geek kid. I had a telescope at age 12. And so... So you didn't have sex for a long time. Sherry O' Terry.

Were you a soap opera person? Young and restless. Okay. Well, first of all, you should know it's the young and the restless. I can't even believe you're mispronouncing the title. abbreviated because we've been so weird for so many years. T.S. Madison.

Are you into Polly? No, no. I don't think so. No. I could have told you no on that. Girl, why are you not into Polly? Just based on what she's wearing and the way her hair is styled. She is not into Polly. Herrots-Rawley. Anna Farris, Dave Franco,

Madeline Kline, Hannah Gadsby, Adam Scott, Wanda Sykes, and more. Listen to Dear Chelsea on the I-Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Brown recluse spiders, like we said, are infamous. They are widely feared. They are hated even, I would say. There are not a small number of people who actively hate.

Not just brown reclars, but all spiders. But it is, it is fascinating that of the 53,000 or so species of spiders on this planet, they are only one of a handful with name recognition. Yeah. We can probably name a few other ones, wolf spiders. Wolf spiders. But do you, I feel like I can say wolf spider? I don't know that I can picture.

Well, probably. I think I can. Tarantula. Torb wivers. Orb weavers. Orb weavers. But then there are different types of orb weavers. Jumping spiders.

Jumping spiders. They're my favorite. They're very, very cute. But yeah, these are definitely one of the few celebrities of the spider world. Yeah. And based on what you told us, Erin, about these painful, necrotic wounds that their bites can cause, that fear is understandable. Like, I'm not going to say it's completely unreasonable to fear spiders. But it is also out of proportion to the actual risk that they pose to most people.

Yeah. Like we said, if you compare a map of the range of brown recluse spiders with one of diagnosed bites, a bunch of those bites are well outside the range. There was, I think, a paper that was describing Brown Reclose Bites in Colorado saying that they are a common seasonal occurrence. And it's like they don't exist here. And if they do exist here, they're like transient. And I'll get into why their spread is not very likely. But anyway, they're scapegoats for a lot of different things. Like you mentioned, there have been diagnosed brown recluse bites that are.

actually strep, chickenpox, diabetic ulcer, chemical burns syphilis, Lyme disease, Stephen Johnson syndrome, fungal infection. And even in that 2001 anthrax bioterrorism, that's when it was misdiagnosed as a brown recluse bite. That's wild. And it didn't happen. Like the person who had this anthrax, cutaneous anthrax, did not live in an area where brown recluse exist. But if you don't have anyone who knows that on your medical team, Then why, I mean, anthrax isn't exactly common either. So why would that be the first thing that you think of? Right. Right. Yeah. And this is, it's sort of like, it's like when you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras. But I do feel like a lot of the time zebras are brown recluse and everyone thinks zebras. And it's like, don't think zebras. And then you're like, all you think about it. But they're actually zebras. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, there's one report that I thought was really interesting showed that of the 600 people, they just.

like a survey who sought help for a spider bite at hospitals in L.A. and Arizona, 80% of those bites were caused by other arthropods entirely. So, like, not spiders. Not spiders. But the reputation of brown recluse spiders is these deadly beasties just like laying in weight to necros your limbs. That's actually a relatively recent reputation that they got. So recluse spiders were suspected of causing necrotic skin lesions as early as the 19th century in the medical literature. at least. No doubt people had made the connection long before. And Ben, like, spider bite is not good. Spider bite, avoid. No one, yeah, no one, no one wants a spider bite. But the Brown Recklace itself was first implicated in that 1929 case report that was in our first-hand account, that 24-year-old woman in Kansas who sought medical care after being bitten. And in that case report, like at the very end, he says the, well, you know, no case of poisoning from its bite has been reported from this region. So that's not that long. It's less than 100 years ago. And occasional reports trickled in in the years that followed. And in 1957 is kind of when things really shifted. So a case, there was a case that confirmed that a bite from Loxicelli's reclusa could cause necrotic skin lesions. So that kicked off a slew of others. And you can actually see the rise in how often the phrase brown recluse was used starting in about 1960. So if you ever used,

Google's Ngram tool. Uh-uh. Oh, it's like a tool that shows you how often a certain word or phrase or whatever is used over time. So you plot it. And it's like a little bump. And then it's like 1960, it starts to rise. Oh, that's so interesting.

Still not very commonly used, but it is interesting. Suddenly the world had begun to take an interest in this shy spider. So 1960 and beyond led to this uptick in fear of this spider. but what else did we learn in this time? I've got a few spider fun facts. I think I have a couple of remaining. Six eyes got that terrible vision. Their nest or not or their webs are not.

Oh, I didn't know they had terrible vision. Not very great. Their nests are not super impressive. They can't balloon. So the way other spiders use their silk to like catch a breeze and they'll traverse some distances. So if you think of spider's web. I think Darwin even called them little aeronauts.

Okay. Something like that. But this actually keeps their potential for dispersal pretty low. So when specimens are found outside of their typical range, it usually means that they were transported by human activity. So like here's a load of lumber. Here's a shipping container. Here's whatever. And so is it likely for them to get established in that new area?

Also probably not based on just environmental conditions. And so actually I found a paper looking at what people think the distribution might shift to as climate change happens. I saw that one. It's north. It's not range expansion. It's range just shift. Yeah. Let's see.

What else? They're super shy, naturally. It's in the name. But even among other brown recluses, there's not a whole lot of aggression. Like, they're not social spiders by any means. There are some spiders that are more social. But they're not going to cannibalize each other if there's enough food to eat and enough crevices to hide in. Okay.

Which is kind of interesting. Yeah. They can grow quite a bit. abundant within dwellings. So there's a, there was a house in Kansas that was 270 meters squared or about 2,900 square feet, where 2,055 spiders were recorded over six months. So one researcher caught more than 80 spiders in under an hour by hand. Yeah. Yeah. So they do quite well in human habitats. And sometimes you will find that in the edges of their ranges, like of their geographic range, they're only found within dwellings, like human dwellings. Interesting.

Because outside, maybe it gets too cold or something like that. The environment's not great for them. Yeah. And so they're harder to detect in nature. They also can live for a surprisingly long time, even though they are quite fragile and many throughout their lives will become injured while capturing prey so they will lose limbs and they don't grow back in subsequent molds. Oh, babies. There was an experiment that showed that in under house-like environments or conditions with like temperature control and stuff, male spiders lived on average 646 days and females lived on average 794.

So it's like two, three years. Mm-hmm. But 25% of females live. lived for more than 1,000 days, and the record was 1,755. It's a long time. They are long lived. Very long lived. But just hanging out in your bookshelf in the book you never read. Just chilling. Yeah. Because they also do really well under with very low resources. So that was with food and water, that's 1700 and beyond. But another experiment found that spiders, these spiders can live for six months in airtight containers without food, water, or air.

What? So they just like shut down metabolism entirely? I think so. They're just like, we will rest. We will rest. We're really good at that. Yep. Yep.

But when they do dine, they prefer dead prey over live prey. And that dead prey could be freshly killed several months old. Maybe it was killed by insecticides or another brown recluse. That's what they like. Okay. Sorry, sorry. Then why do they have such intense venom? I don't know. I really tried to find like evolutionary blah-b-de-blah about venom ecological role for brown recluses specifically. And maybe my search terms were off. I don't know. Maybe we are just unlucky that like there's like the compatibility that venom just happens to be really compatible with us.

blood? I don't know. Blake breaking. That's just so interesting if they're mostly eating dead stuff and they're not aggressive even to other spiders. Yeah. Or is it like, because I know, and I wish that I had looked into this more, but I know there's like, you know, the people who want us all to be less afraid of spiders will say how much more potent certain spiders venoms are, but they can't penetrate our skin, right? Like daddy long legs and stuff. And I don't, I've never looked into the veracity of those claims, but like maybe that is the case. And so it's just like combo of bad they've got super sharp little.

I wish I knew more. So interesting. But yeah, they're very much sit and wait, even if so they'll like kill something and then wait, come back to it later, whatever. But 92% motionless of their lives. Not motionless. Motionless. Imagine.

Which is quite relatable. Yeah. Many days I feel like 92%. On the reproductive front, they're not very prolific compared to other spiders. So their egg sacks contain. like 50 eggs, about half of which hatch. But there are other spiders that hundreds to thousands of eggs, of eggs, of eggs, and their eggs sacks.

Yeah. Yep. So these spiders, as you can see, have rich lives beyond their venomous potential. But I will acknowledge that, yes, their venom is one of the more interesting things about them. So let's talk about it in a little bit more detail. So, Aaron, you covered all the ins and outs of this specific venom of the Brown Reclose. And so what about spider venom's more broadly?

Again, they are incredibly varied. All spiders produce them. Well, sorry, the vast, vast majority of all spiders produce venom. There's one family that has lost, that had once had apparently, the ability, but they've lost the ability to make venom. Interesting. Yep. And across the over 50,000 spider species that make venom, they make a bunch of different kinds. How many?

We have no idea. because spider venom is relatively understudied compared to things like snake venom or even scorpion venom. And most research looking at spider venom has been directed towards these handful of species that are medically important. Right. So why do spiders make venom? Why does anything make venom? It usually falls into one of three reasons. There's defense, there's competition, and there's predation.

So most spiders make venom to incapacitate and kill their prey, but defense also avoid. of course, plays a role. So for instance, some research has found that in some species, males and females make different kinds of have different types of venom profiles. With females making more complex, but less toxic venoms in one situation, this might be due to how males and females of different species live. So maybe males of a species are more likely to encounter a wide range of prey. Maybe they have more generalist venom, for example. Maybe. Maybe they have more generalist venom, for example. Maybe females of a species move around more and carry an egg sack need to eat more, so they might have a more powerful venom for defense. Venom composition can also change from individual to individual and across the spider's lifespan.

Venom is costly to make. So they're typically going to be very economical with like there's been studies that show that the amount of venom injected by a spider or deployed by a spider correlates sometimes to prey size. So if this prey is smaller, they're going to use less. If the prey is bigger, they're going to use more. So they're like really making a decision and controlling those. Well, decision is, yeah. But they modulate how much venom is used. Oh, how interesting.

And they typically will only deploy it as a last resort. So especially in a defensive situation, they're like, can I just run away without wasting all of this venom? Or do I have to use it? And so that's why, like, Brown Reclose, it's like only in the last resort. They're trapped. Oh, my God. Yeah. Do we have any evidence? Do they dry bite the way that sometimes snakes do? I think that they do. Yeah. I think that's what I read. So interesting. But yeah, spiders can inject their venom with a bite. They can imbue it into their silk so that if a little critter comes, they can start acting to either immobilize it or kill it. What? And there's even some

spiders that can spray it defensively similar to like spitting cobras. Out of their fangs? Yeah. Oh, wow. Exactly. But however they deliver the venom, whether it's specialist or general, spiders do it well. They are some of the most successful and abundant predators on this planet. Each year, if you walk away with one fun fact, this is it. Okay. Each year, spiders consume between 400 and 800 million tons of insects around the globe.

Whoa. By comparison, humans consume around 400 tons of meat and fruit. fish every year. Seriously. That's what I read. I am astounded by those numbers. I know. That's a lot of biomass.

That's a lot of biomass. And most of that is other insects, including those characterized as agricultural pests. A healthy ecosystem means lots of spiders. They play a big role in food webs as both predator and prey. Food webs. Exactly. I mean, we use web for so many different things. I know.

But in cultivated areas like farms and orchards, they are of tremendous importance in keeping down numbers of critters like aphids or any other, any other like pests. None are coming to mind right now. But they're especially helpful in areas that are pesticide free. Because if you're like, if you can avoid just like spraying and spraying and spraying and spraying, right? Spiders are your friends. Yeah, they are. They've also been used in other contexts for biological control of pests. So, for instance, some studies have explored the use of spider species that prey on brown recluse to keep numbers down within dwelling. So they're like, brown recluse do have natural predators. If you don't want a house infestation, that's understandable. They do pose a medical risk. And so you could, so there's been some studies saying, what if we introduce or have present? the other spiders that occur in this area that prey on brown recluse.

I love it. That's a great idea. Another study found that when they introduced spiders, it's an old study, but they introduced spiders in houses in South Africa that preyed on flies. And this is not brown recluse related. But they found that cases of GI infections declined with a declining fly population. Interesting. Because as they would move around and poopy. Grossness around.

Yeah. But spiders are on the decline. Like insects, populations of arachnids also seem to be decreasing over the past decades across the entire globe. And what that will mean for ecosystems is unclear. Can't be good. No. One of the major hurdles, though, in conservation of spiders, just like in conservation of parasites, is the widespread dislike and fear that surrounds this group of animals. There's one study that found that between, uh,

20 and 30% of people in the U.K. felt anxious or fearful around spiders. And an estimated 3 to 6% of the global population has arachnophobia. That's actually lower than I expect 3 to 6%. Well, I think it's to have it be character, like as a phobia. As an actual illness. Yeah. It has to reach a certain threshold. There are questionnaires that try to assess this and like physiological responses.

But I do think that like that 20, 30% of people was specific. in the UK, I think that that's probably fairly standard, if not like under low. Yeah. In some areas, higher and others. Yeah. Fear of snakes is up there, too, as well as, like, one of the other common phobias. But I would guess that more people know the word arachnophobia than they do the phobia for snakes. Do you know the one for snakes?

Nope. See? I didn't either. No, that's too general. It's ophidio phobia. Ophidiophobia. Yeah. Didn't know that.

Yeah, me either. Fear of spiders. Like, why do we fear spiders, right? And it's been suggested that it is evolutionarily ingrained within us because their spider bites can be harmful. Right. But the number of spiders that actually pose threat to humans is pretty low. This is kind of a false equivalency, but you are 2,500 times more likely to be killed by a human than a spider. As an example.

This fear is also heavily tinged with disgust, which is kind of interesting in the context of other animals that we fear, right? Like, I don't think snakes is highly associated with disgust. Right. It's just fear. Fear. Yeah. And some researchers have suggested that this presence of disgust points toward it being a learned fear, like carried down in cultures over the years. And historically, in many regions of the world, spiders.

were thought to carry disease and transmitt disease. Huh. And so maybe fear and disgust toward spiders lingers because we thought that they caused disease. Disease. That's so interesting. It could be both. It could be partially evolutionary ingrained. It could be learned.

I always just thought it was the way that they move. I was scared, you know, I was very scared of spiders for most of my entire life. and had to unlearn that fear. In Panama? In actually, even before Panama, like, in part just doing entomology, having to be able to hold a tarantula to show to little kids. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then it was just like, I didn't, I was embarrassed to be an entomologist in training and be afraid of spiders. And then having kids, I was like, I don't want them to be afraid.

And so now I, like, really have to be like, I'm not afraid at all. But there is just something deep that lingers where I will always pick them up and take them outside. We'll look at them. Oh, these are so fun and cool. Look at their little body parts. But there's just something that's... Inside, you're freaking out. Yeah.

Hide it very well. Hide it. Conceal don't feel. Yes. Cense Elsa. I don't feel... I've never had an issue with spiders. Cockroaches and house centipedes have really been my...

Interesting. My absolute terror. Just creep out. just vomit, like feeling like nauseous and cold sweats all over. How interesting. Yeah. But I mean, growing up in Florida, we would have the palmetto bugs. And there was one that like crawled into my shirt.

And so like I just, I have, I don't like that. Still to this day, Panama was rough on the cockroach front. I would find them on my toothbrush, on my pillow everywhere in my life. I remember that. One crawled up my naked leg. Anyway. But we all have spiders. stories, it turns out. Yeah. And spiders loom large in many cultures around the world. In Navajo and Pueblo

creation stories, spider woman wove into existence the world and everything in it. And everything she created remains connected to her through spider silk, ensuring continued access to her wisdom and her protection. That's really nice. There's the Greek myth of Arachne, a talented weaver who was turned into a spider by the envious goddess Minerva. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. She was like, you want to weave? Here you go.

Here you go. You think you're better than me. Yeah. But do spiders show us this, so many different things. Like there's no one word or personality trait that we ascribe to spiders continuously, right? Like sloths are lazy. Foxes are sly. Spiders are everything.

They're, this is interaction. this intersection between horror and beauty. They're solitary. They're treacherous. So many different things. Shilab in Lord of the Rings. It in Stephen King's It is a spider. They're also women, like often.

Feminine. They are evoked in stories of femme fatals, these treacherous and deceitful women who lay their tracts. Spiders are also recognized for their creative talent and their hardworking nature. They've given us phrases like web and network spinning a tail. And spiders teach us resilience, like in the nursery rhyme of the itsy-bitsy spider. And then called up the spout again.

And then every single time. Every single time. You just got to keep doing it. E.B. White, the author of Charlotte's Web, wrote, quote, once you begin watching spiders, you haven't time for much else. The world is really loaded with them. Isn't that cute? That's really cute.

The story of how he got the idea for Spider's Spider's Spider's Web, for Charlotte's Web is he had a, like, found a spider in a barn, brought her in a shoebox to his apartment in New York. She hatched a ton of spiders and he just let them like chill and he was just like wanted to see them and he was enthralled and entranced by these little spitties. Yeah. And even I think Darwin at one point on the voyage of the Beagle, became infatuated with spiders. He said something like, I am red hot with spiders. He was like, just loved watching them and loved watching them balloon across the ship. But it's kind of cool.

It's true. The world is loaded with spiders. And I used to do this a lot, especially in Panama, but I highly recommend next time you're somewhere in nature at night. Could even just be a backyard. Take out a flashlight, headlamp, shine it on the. ground. Those glittering sparkles that you see scattered throughout the grass, throughout the bushes, many of those are spider eyes. Yeah. And it kind of is like maybe that's scary at first, and maybe it's comforting because how often do you actually see them? How often do you interact with

them? Right. These things are doing so much work for us. We don't have to roll out the welcome mats for the brown recluse, the black widows of the world. Take them out of your house if you don't want them inside. Yes. Doing this episode, I think, I've never had an issue with spiders, but it did make me kind of take a step back and go, oh, there is a lot of work that these spiders do for us. Yeah. And they are cute and they are wonderful. And so that's all I've got about brown reckless bites. Do we have? And spiders in general. I don't know what I'm going to do for other spider venom episodes. Hey, we'll have more. Don't you worry. We'll figure it out. But do you have any for me about the epi of spider bites? No, Erin.

I think what's interesting is that unlike almost every other disease we've ever covered, we probably overestimate rather than underestimate how often we're bit by spiders in general. That's so funny. Right? Is that the first time? I can't remember another time that we, maybe someone who knows our podcast better than we do can tell us. But especially when it comes to specifically. spiders like brown recluses. Like most of the time, if you think it is that, it probably isn't,

which is so interesting. There was a paper from 2006 that went through all of the case reports that they could find of supposed brown recluse bites in the U.S. And of 908 case reports, only 8% of those were actually confirmed with a spider and, like, confirmation that that spider was a brown recluse. Yeah. So it's really hard to say, how often people are actually being bitten and how often those bites are bad enough to really need medical care. Well, and it's also interesting. It's probably both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed because how many people get bitten and never realize it? Never even realize it. Exactly. Although there was that paper that you said where they found 2,000 spiders over the course of six months in a house. No one was bitten. No one was ever bitten. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot to mention that. That is a pretty cool.

2,000 spiders all around your house. Although that was a big house. You said 2,900. It's a big house. It's a big house. It's a big house. It is reassuring, though. It is very reassuring, right? They're just living among thousands of brown recluses and never having any issues with it.

That being said, I read that in Brazil, where there's a different species of loxascelli's that's most important there, there's about 3,000 annual reports of Loxicelli's bites. Are those all for sure confirmed? I don't know. Right. That's the data that I have. And like you said, it is not unlikely that the distribution of these spiders could change due to future climate scenarios, not necessarily expand. But who knows? It just makes it more important that people who work in the medical profession know where these spiders live if they live near you or have somebody on staff who's able to help identify spider bikes, which I think we don't have enough of.

So here's shout out to your local arachnologist or entomologist. Does poison control do spider bites? I imagine that they, but like they're not, you're not going to be able to like send them your specimens necessarily. Yeah. As far as I know. Take a picture. Take a picture. But I don't, I don't know.

It's a great question. But that's all I have, Erin, for brown recluses. Brown recluses. Hopefully we did a little bit of, yeah, PR uplift of the species. Don't seek them out. Just leave them be. And that's the new PSA. Should we tell the people where to learn more about?

We definitely should. Okay. I have a bunch of different kind of an assorted collection of papers. By Sandage at all from 2005, Brown Recruz Spiders, a review of biology, life history, and pest management was an interesting. interesting one, just an overview of them. By Ludica from 2022, the biology and evolution of spider venom's, if you want to know more about Venoms broadly. And then by Davy from 1994, the disgusting spider, the role of disease and illness and the perpetuation of fear of spiders. Oh, I love that. I also loved that biology and evolution of spider venom's paper. That was my first one on my list.

There's also a chapter in the handbook of clinical toxicology of animal venoms and poisons from 2017 that was on the biology and distribution of spiders and medical importance. There's also a paper that was really interesting, super recent, 2026 in the Journal of Medical Entomology that was recluse spiders contesting myths on distribution, bite behavior, and medical risk in Florida. I saw that one. Yes. So interesting. They only have invasive Mediterranean recluse species in Florida. And even those are very low abundance. and they did super interesting, like trying to force these things to bite, and they just didn't.

Right. They just wouldn't. They're like, I don't, why? This venom costs me to make. I want to keep it. Yeah. Anyways, that was great. There was a New England Journal of Medicine Paper from 2005 bites of brown reclux spiders

and suspectic necrotic arachnitism. Listen, there's so many more. Check them out on our website. This podcast will kill you.com under the episodes tab. Yes. Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you so much. Thank you to Leanna and Tom and Mark and Pete and everyone at exactly right for everything that you do to make this podcast and our YouTube. Hello. Possible. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you to listeners for listening, watchers for watching, whatever, people who do stuff with this podcast. I need to find a better way to say this. Thank you, though. We do this for you and we hope you like it and it means everything. It does. We will do more spiders, by the way. So tell us the spiders that you want to hear next.

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