|
?:reviewBody
|
-
A scare story about venomous South American Blush Spiders supposedly lurking under toilet seats and delivering fatal bites to the posteriors of several victims first surfaced on the Internet during the summer of 1999 and has since become firmly entrenched in the realm of urban legendry — nearly two decades since its original appearance, the butt spider warning continues to circulate widely via social media and e-mail forwards: The original version was fairly easy to identify as a hoax by the slightly-altered and obsolete real names used to give it an air of authenticity. Thus Chicago's O'Hare airport became Blare Airport, the Journal of the American Medical Association became the Journal of the United Medical Association, the name of the Civil Aeronautics Board was invoked even though that organization was dissolved in 1984, and an apocryphal genus/species classification of arachnius gluteus (i.e., butt spider) was assigned to the star of the legend. In October 2002 new life was breathed into this hoax when it was circulated anew with many of its details changed (to reference real rather than fictional entities) and the inclusion of a photograph, even though the text of the warning barely shifted at all: Whatever version of this item one might encounter, it's all nothing but a hoax. No medical journal reported on the deaths of persons discovered to have been killed by spiders lurking in the toilets of restaurants and airliner bathrooms, and although the Two-Striped Telamonia (also known as the Two-striped Jumper or Telamonia dimidiata) is a real spider primarily found in South Asian tropical rain forests, it is not venomous and poses no danger to humans. Moreover, although some spiders prefer dark, cool places and can sometimes be found under (usually outdoor) toilet seats, as memorialized in Slim Newton's 1972 song about the Australian Redback Spider, The Redback on the Toilet Seat, an airliner toilet would be quite an inhospitable abode for a spider due to the caustic chemicals used in them. Of all the precautions you might want to take when traveling by air, checking under the toilet rim for spiders should be given a very low priority. Steve Heard, the originator of this hoax, explained to us via e-mail how he came to create it: Entomologists Richard Vetter and Kirk Visscher, writing in the journal American Entomology, noted of the hoax that its successful spread was due in part to its similarity with commonly expressed fears about real spiders such as the brown recluse:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}