When I was a child, I heard many terrible rumors about animals in my family, and the most common ones I heard were: worms (commonly known as money strings) would drill into the ears, geckos would burrow into people's clothes after their tails were broken, riding dogs would rot their crotches, snakes would be retaliated against by snakes, and skin that touched spider urine would be corroded and festered.
Of course, most of these folk rumors are unreliable rumors, some have long been debunked, but there are still many people who believe in them, and some people will even attack the debunkers with a blank face, basically saying: "The old people in the family have their own wisdom, and the rice you have eaten is saltier than the road you have traveled", "The world is big and strange, you just sit in the well and look at the sky and don't know", "There is nothing wrong with the things handed down from ancient times, you count the old ones" and so on...
Every time I write an article to refute rumors, I can see such people appear in the comment area, and I have made the evidence, literature, and scientific conclusions clear, or they are brainlessly sprayed. Why do these people selectively blind, not looking at scientific arguments and literature support, but insisting on attacking authors?
Don't think about it, it must be that this kind of professional rumor-busting article harms their vested interests, which will cause them to be so afraid, so disrespectful, so annoyed and angry, and it is useless to be angry with them, and these people have hypnotized themselves.
Gossip less, today we will analyze and analyze the classic rumor that "spider urine will cause skin ulceration and sores" that has spread throughout the country.
Spider, a word that makes many people feel mixed. Most of today's girls hate and fear spiders, and they scream when they see spiders at home, but they love Spider-Man in Marvel very much, and they think that Spider-Man is very cute whether it is a movie character or an actor (Dutch brother).
China's traditional concept of spiders also has several different views: some say that spiders are evil and terrifying goblins; some say that there are happy things about spiders entering the home, and many kinds of spiders (mainly ghost spiders) are called "happy spiders" in the folk; Chinese medicine believes that spiders can be used whole as a medicine, which can dispel wind and swelling, and treat hemorrhoidal fistulas.
Where does the legend that spider urine can make people fester, where did this claim come from? A: Chinese medicine texts. In the "Materia Medica" published by the Song Dynasty, it is said: "Spiders urinate on people as sores." This means that once the spider's urine is stained with people, the part that is stained will rot and burn out.
First of all, we must say that Chinese medicine and Chinese medicine do have a very important position and role, but it is really not true that all Chinese medicine texts are correct.
At that time, people were limited by what they saw and knew, and most of them were determined by the curative effect of materialism, and it was impossible for people with the rapid development of modern science to have the same broad knowledge. In addition, the "Compendium of Materia Medica" also says that "being bitten by a spider, the abdomen is as large as a pregnant woman, drinking goat's milk for several days and flat", emmm... It's hard to put into words.
Why am I so sure that spider urine causes skin ulceration to be false? Quite simply, because the spider doesn't urinate at all, it doesn't have the function of urinating at all. Urine is a metabolic waste product produced by the work of the kidneys, while arthropods do not have kidneys.
The spider's excretory system consists of martens tubes and fecal bags, in which martens tubes are responsible for work similar to the vertebrate kidneys, but not exactly the same.
The Martens tube is located in the spider midgut position (endoderm) and is responsible for processing nitrogen, sodium, potassium and other substances in food to form the original urine, while the base segment of the Martens duct can absorb water and inorganic ions from the original urine again to form crystallized uric acid, and finally excrete it with the stool after mixing with the stool bag.
In other words, what the spider excretes is just feces, not urine. But the feces that have just been excreted from the body may bring some wetness, so is it that the ancients treated the spider's uncoagulated feces as urine?
It doesn't make sense, because spider feces are not poisonous and will not fester the skin.
Talk about the toxicity of spiders, most spiders are poisonous, in all spiders, only the suborder Arachnidae, the vortex spider family under the suborder Neoapodae and the Holarchaea genus under the Anapidae family, a total of more than three hundred species of spiders are not poisonous, and it is not common, it can be said that the spiders we usually see are almost all poisonous, including garden spiders, ghost spiders, white-fronted cancer spiders (white-fronted tall-legged spiders), jumping spiders, etc.
But poisonous to poisonous, most of the common spider toxicity is actually no threat to humans, if it is a small spider can not even bite through the human skin, by the large spider bite may have stinging and discomfort, but usually does not cause serious impact, except for a few highly venomous spider species.
Moreover, there is only one poisonous gland in the spider's whole body, and inside the poisonous fangs, the spider's internal organs and digestive system do not have any toxicity, so the excrement will certainly not be poisonous.
Therefore, those who think that they have been "peeed by spiders" and are sure that they have not been bitten by large spiders have itching, bad sores, ulcers, etc., which have nothing to do with spiders, but other problems in this area.
For example, if you shoot dead poisonous cryptopteropters on your body, come into contact with the spiny hairs of the larvae of the stinging moth (commonly known as the spices), be corroded by chemicals, be allergic to a substance that has just been touched, suffer from dermatitis or eczema, etc., or hurry to the hospital for formal examination, don't throw the pot to the spider, people are busy catching worms to eat.