Growing Ear Spiders
The weird news making headlines recently is the true story of a Oregonian boy who had a pair of spiders living in his ear. But this got my own spider-sense tingling, because that is a pretty tight space for even the tiniest chelicerates to co-habitate. Rather, I suspected that there was only one spider that had molted while in the boy’s head. And sure enough, if you watch the video at CNN, it certainly seems that way. The actual spider is denser, and sitting at the bottom of the jar. The shed skin is lighter and floating. So instead of two spiders in his ear, he had just one that was growing bigger. Not sure which is worse.
But how did the critter get in there? Well, I once heard an interesting anecdote from an arachnologist. He postulated that we are never more than eight feet away from a spider at any given time, even in the cleanest of buildings. They are just all around us.
UPDATE: Seems that Straight Dope agrees with me.
Tags: invertebrates
May 7th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Speaking as an Oregonian with an nagging itch in my ear, I’m officially creeped out. (I’ve already been to a doctor.)
It’s worth noting that the caption for the image on the first link says he only kept one spider in that jar. Although all the other stories, including the original KGW story, do say there are two.
May 7th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Glenn: The other piece of evidence in support of my supposition is the report that the first one flushed out with the initial lavage (=the molt) and the second one (=actual spider) required a second squirt.
May 7th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
You are undoubtedly correct about the molt! Additional evidence includes the names the boy gave the spiders…Floatie (for the cast skin) and Drownie (for the actual spider). Now, what species?
June 14th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
[...] the last bit means that ear spiders are out of the consideration. But highlights so far include: baconopod, sink cephalopods and [...]