There are many cases of humans being bitten by the brown spider (Loxosceles reclusa).
A greenhouse spider (Parasteatoda tepidariorum)
The white-tailed spider (Lampona cylindrata) sometimes bites while people are sleeping
Sina Science and Technology News Beijing time on November 19, according to foreign media reports, will we often swallow spiders when we sleep? Some people are convinced of this claim, but no one seems to know the exact answer. BBC Earth raised the issue on its Facebook page and received numerous responses from netizens. From some people's experience, this does happen occasionally.
There have been cases of spiders living in the ear canal in China. A woman went to the Department of Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery of Changsha Central Hospital because of itchy ears, and found spiders in the ear canal. Coincidentally, singer Kate Marlowe revealed in 2014 that a jumping spider had once entered her ear canal with the help of headphones.
There have been many examples in the medical literature of spiders biting while people are sleeping. In a study of white-tailed spiders in Australia, about a third of people were bitten in their sleep.
Spiders are also a type of spider that is often active at night, and their bites are very violent, and the bitten person often has to be sent to the hospital for treatment. An analysis of these cases revealed that spiders usually bite the hands, feet and legs, and occasionally bite the face, including an 8-year-old girl who was bitten on the eyelid while sleeping.
Some people have had similar experiences of being bitten by spiders at night. "I was once bitten in the face by a spider while I was sleeping," said Netizen Wendy Marshall, "and we were living in South Africa at the time." The doctor said the spider probably crawled over my face and then I disturbed it! Luckily it was too big to be swallowed by me. Another netizen, Sue Merzel, said that when one of her friends woke up, she "found that there were thousands of pins on her face, because an egg sac exploded on her bed at night."
Anecdotes like this suggest that spiders do have the potential to crawl onto a person's face while they are asleep, and in rare cases they may crawl into a person's mouth. Netizen Mudassirul Waris said that one morning when he was brushing his teeth, he felt a particularly strange "disgusting taste" in his mouth, and he spat out in a hurry and found that "there are several legs of greenhouse spiders".
Netizen Paul Dixon recalls a similar experience when he lived in a converted attic. "When I woke up, I could feel something in my mouth, just between my lower teeth and my gums, and I stuck my finger in and dug out a little spider," he said. ”
If these examples make you feel anxious, you should listen to the opinions of experts. Dave Clark, head of the invertebrates unit at London Zoo in the UK, said: "Most spiders don't provoke animals larger than themselves because they are likely to suffer more. "Spiders are very sensitive to vibration and temperature, so it is unlikely that they will be aware of the presence of a human body." They're actually not interested in us at all," Clark said.
So, if the spider only ran into the mouth of the sleeper by very accidental circumstances, what is the probability of this happening? Some netizens said that the frequency of swallowing spiders at night is about 7 times a year, while some netizens believe that such things happen about 8 times in a lifetime. Of course, more netizens said, "How can we possibly know?" ”
Indeed, there are many doubts about these views. Netizen Kenneth Knutsen pointed out that such a claim originated from a professional article about personal computers in 1993. In the article, columnist Lisa Holst falsified some "truths" in an attempt to show that email recipients are susceptible to deception. "Ironically," Knutsen said, "this pseudo-'truth' created by Holst spread rapidly, becoming one of the most widely disseminated misleading messages on the Internet." Ironically, however, there is currently no way to confirm Holst, and whether the article she wrote really exists. (Ren Tian)