![]() So what my paper is doing is giving information to the entomologists and arachnologists so they can properly identify the spiders-and there's also information about how toxic these things are, and it should stop some of the insanity that goes on when people find a large spider in their fruits. Or you have 20 truckloads of wicker furniture from Mexico that they are going to fumigate and then develop a personal-protection program for their employees. you've got $26,000 worth of bananas sitting on a ship because somebody has identified this thing as a deadly wandering spider. This has caused, and can cause, some severe economic situations. What are the economic impacts of misidentifying spider species? (Also see " Ask Your Weird Animal Questions: What Happens If You Swallow a Spider?") But I only got about half the spiders that people contacted the fruit importer about. And this is from somebody who's bringing international cargo into North America. How frequently will you find a spider falling out of your bananas? And the red-faced banana spider ( Cupiennius chiapanensis). Ecuador is where they're coming from in bananas a lot. They're found all over the world in tropical areas. The main ones are the pantropical huntsman spiders ( Heteropoda venatoria)-big, leggy beasts, very attractive-they're the ones with the white moustache. Which spiders do you tend to see most commonly in fruit shipments coming to North America? National Geographic spoke with Vetter about the most common banana-riding spiders and why it's important to clear up these misconceptions. In total, Vetter tallied 135 spider hitchhikers, only seven of which were Phoneutria. Then he spent the next eight years identifying who the international stowaways actually were, results that will appear soon in the Journal of Medical Entomology. He searched the scientific literature and asked a fruit importer to report any incidences of spiders turning up in shipments. Suspecting that wandering spiders rarely go to North America in a fruit basket, Vetter set out in 2006 to determine which spiders are really bumming rides across the Equator. But often, the hitchhiking spiders are harmless-victims of a case of mistaken identity, says arachnologist Rick Vetter, now retired from the University of California, Riverside. (See " 7 Bug and Spider Myths Squashed.") This is because people can be quick to assume the stowaways are Brazilian wandering spiders, dangerous South American arachnids with a reputation for being fast, aggressive, and highly toxic (the name of their genus, Phoneutria, means murderess in Greek). Grocery stores have pulled whole shipments of produce, as occurred in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2013. Homes have been evacuated ( again and again). Reactions can be extreme: Schools have closed. The arachnids, which hide among bunches of bananas and other fruit shipped from South America to the United States and the United Kingdom, can frighten the daylights out of unsuspecting humans. Fruit shipped from afar sometimes arrives with an unwelcome bonus: a large, scary-looking spider.
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