Jesus Christ that irritates me. I stumbled across a photo slideshow about how to identify insects and their bites. I thought, “Oh, this looks interesting,” or at least until I got to the point where a black widow was described as “poisonous”, and the venom of a brown recluse as, “extremely poisonous”. NO, NO, NO, NO and a million times, fucking NO! Of those two spiders, the most dangerous is probably the black widow because its venom is hemotoxic and can cause anything from severe nausea and vomiting to paralysis. They have only a small amount of venom, so the bite of a single black widow is unlikely to kill anyone but children, the elderly and those whose systems are somehow “compromised”. The brown recluse is also a small spider, and its fangs are so small that many people do not even realise they’ve been bitten until the redness and swelling start to show. Its bite won’t make you sick or paralyse you, but if it goes the wrong way, it will make you sorry you ever came into contact with the spider. Some brown recluse bites heal without incident; presenting as no more than a small red mark that might be mistaken for a mosquito bite, and gone in a few days. When they don’t heal, though, they really don’t heal because tissue turns necrotic and begins to rot. People have lost fingers and big chunks of flesh as a result of surgical removal in an effort to stop the necrosis. What these two spiders do have in common (aside from the fact that both species are found in this area) is that….
THEY ARE NOT FUCKING POISONOUS.
Poisonous is for puffer fish and poison dart frogs; don’t ingest it and you’ll be fine. I could hug a puffer fish every day of the week and be perfectly healthy. I could handle poison dart frogs as long as I didn’t have open wounds on my hands, and washed my hands immediately afterward, definitely before I made a peanut butter sandwich. Do not lick poison dart frogs. They are poisonous. Spiders, snakes, scorpions, bees, wasps, ants, gila monsters, lionfish and stonefish are venomous. Blue-ringed octopus and platypus, too. The delivery of their toxins involves biting, stinging or stabbing to get the venom beneath the skin. I could eat a brown recluse on my peanut butter sandwich and I’d be fine as long as it didn’t bite me first.
I know–pedantic–but I don’t care because it’s wrong. Poisonous is for puffers, dart frogs, deadly nightshade and mushrooms…stuff you shouldn’t eat or apply to broken skin. Venomous is for the rattlesnake you shouldn’t tease, the cottonmouth moccasin you don’t want in the ol’ swimming hole when you go skinnydipping, and the black widow spider you don’t want under the stairs when you reach in blindly for the camping equipment. Don’t step on the stonefish. Poison, ingest. Venom, inject. It’s high school biology, not fucking rocket science, and I’d expect better from something with “MD” in the name, even if it is only WebMD.
