The new study, which gathered data on the bites of a range of species of spiders, was quite valuable, because researchers don't know much about the potential medical importance of a lot of these species, Buddle said. "I think it has largely been almost a hoax," he told Live Science.
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"I actually believe that it's not at all a real thing that the hobo spiders" have bites that can kill human skin tissue, said Christopher Buddle, an arachnologist at McGill University, who was not involved in the study. Other researchers agreed with the idea that hobo spiders are not dangerous. "They can't be proven wrong, and 90 percent of everything heals by itself anyway." "Spider bite diagnoses are very handy diagnoses for a lot of doctors," Vetter said. People may blame other medical conditions, for instance, skin conditions, on spider bites. Previous reports of hobo spider bites have cited largely circumstantial evidence, with people reporting bites without providing evidence they were actually bitten by a hobo spider, or any spider at all, the researchers said. And while this may not necessarily mean that hobo spiders rarely bite people, there is not sufficient evidence to prove that they are "common biters," either, Vetter said. But over the three-year period, the researchers found only one such report.
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"Spiders are a very handy scapegoat to blame all the time" because, historically, people have had a negative view of spiders, Vetter told Live Science.Īt the outset of the study, the researchers had wanted to look at a series of cases of hobo spider bites. The victim of the hobo spider suffered only pain, redness and twitching. It turned out that none of the spider bites in the sample, including the one inflicted by the hobo spider, resulted in dermonecrosis - the death of skin cells. Unlike some previous studies on spider bites, the researchers looked only at reports in which people actually caught the spiders that bit them, and submitted the eight-legged beasts as evidence. The researchers examined the symptoms of the spider bite victims. Different spider species perpetrated the bites, with one coming from a hobo spider. In the new study, Vetter and his colleagues examined 33 reported, verified spider bites that occurred in Oregon over three years.
The spiders build funnel-shaped webs in dark, moist areas, and are fast runners - moving up to 3 feet (1 meter) per second. They have since spread through the Pacific northwest. The brown and grey spiders are native to Europe, and were probably introduced into the Seattle area in the 1920s or early 1930s. Hobo spiders are moderately large, measuring about a quarter-inch to a half-inch (7 to 14 millimeters) in body length, with a 1- to 2-inch (27 to 45 mm) leg span.
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