“Feel my neck,” says Sarah Darmody, her eyes widening in terror. “It’s pumping.”
Across the room at the Australian Museum, Darmody has just spotted a colossal, hairy, golden huntsman (a species that lays eggs the size of golf balls). It’s alive. As an arachnophobe who flinches even at a spider emoji, this is about as scary as it gets.
The huntsman, however, is not an escapee. We are visiting the Australian Museum’s recently opened interactive exhibition Spiders: Alive and Deadly. More than 400 specimens are on show, ranging from tarantulas to golden orbs to wolf spiders. Fifteen of those have heartbeats.
“I’m recoiling,” gasps the Sydney-based author, who has come with me to confront her worst fears. “It’s really visceral. It’s a bodily response.”
Australia is home to 10,000 spider species. Yet despite the vast numbers of people who fear spiders to some degree (55% of women and 18% of men in the western world) and the country’s reputation abroad for fearsome creepy-crawlies, you’re more likely to be killed by a bee sting than a spider bite.
Indeed, just two native Australian spiders are a real danger to humans: the Sydney funnel-web, most likely found on the pricey North Shore (“the more expensive the area, the greater the funnel-web population”, according to the Australian Museum website), and the redback.
Since targeted funnel-web antivenom programs began in the 1980s, there have been no recorded deaths from the Sydney spider. That’s despite its powerful fangs – larger than a brown snake’s and able to pierce through a human toenail – and its ability to survive underwater for up to 30 hours (never, ever scoop one out of the pool with your bare hands). Redbacks, meanwhile, are responsible for roughly 2,000 bites per year, but only one fatality has been attributed to the species in the past 60 years.
So with deaths by drowning (271 last year), motor vehicle accidents (1,209), and even sharks (two) more likely than death-by-spider-bite, why do these creatures evoke such horror?
Darmody dates her arachnophobia back to childhood, when she saw a giant, human-stomping tarantula in the movies. As a girl, she recalls flipping open a copy of National Geographic and coming across a photograph of a spider. Suddenly, the magazine was flying across the room. “And I made a noise. I didn’t even realise I’d done it,” she says. “The magazine hit the wall. It was an involuntary response.”
One study showed that children – given entirely free rein to choose – reported fearing spiders the most, followed by being kidnapped, predators, and the dark.
Researchers have different theories about why this is. In 1971, the psychologist Martin Seligman proposed the hypothesis of “biological preparedness”. In the past, spiders presented a real peril to the human race, something that today – despite the development of modern medicine and antivenom – we continue to be prewired for.
Darmody, like many arachnophobes, knows, intellectually at least, that spiders are unlikely to hurt her. “Venom and silk – they’re such beautiful, powerful words, I’m really attracted to them,” she admits. “That’s not ‘spidery’ to me.”
Instead, her revulsion is tied to the sensation of scuttling legs, the “unexpected shapes” a spider makes when it shifts, and its slimy underbelly when flipped over. She feels “repulsed, like I’m going to be sick. My fingers start to tingle. I want to keep them in sight so I know they’re not going to move.”
Some believe this is because of “disgust-evoking status”. Humans are trained to recoil from animals or items that create feelings of disgust. These may include maggots, that signal the presence of rotten meat, rats, which spread disease, and slugs, whose slimy texture is similar to bodily fluids emitted when sick. Bats, snakes, cockroaches, and spiders all tie into the same pattern.
Then there’s cultural conditioning. Depictions of spiders can be positive. The children’s story Charlotte’s Web features a saviour spider. Spider-Man is one of our most beloved superheroes. And spiders have long been associated with lucky escapes (indeed King David, the prophet Muhammad, and the Japanese mythological warrior Yoritomo – all in different tales flee their enemies by hiding in a cave or a tree hollow, the entrance of which is spun over by a spider’s web).
These, however, are equally matched by stories that play on dread, epitomised by the 1990 American horror film Arachnophobia. (Not helped by the ABC, which in 2012 banned an “unsuitable” episode of Peppa Pig for featuring a friendly spider, fearing it might teach children “that spiders were not to be feared”).
The west has a long history of associating spiders with disease, as opposed to some areas of Africa, where people consider them a delicacy. In Italy, until the 17th century, tarantula bites were thought to cause the psychological illness “tarantism”, which led to hysterical behaviour and a desperate need to dance, of which they were apparently cured by moving to the upbeat tempo of the folksy tarantella.
Darmody, thankfully, makes it through the Spiders exhibition without breaking down or inexplicably shaking her booty. She has survived the glass cages stuffed with spiders, the gift shop selling spider paraphernalia, and the venom-milking lab. She hopes this means she will no longer be woken by dreams of spiders, “trying to get in my mouth, or being [trapped] in a spider’s web unable to get away”.
If she has to go, she announces, she’d really much rather be eaten by a lion.
• Spiders: Alive and Deadly is on now at the Australian Museum in Sydney.
