Who is the killer

Media coverage of human encounters with spiders is rife with misinformation, according to a study by more than 60 scientists around the world.
They compiled a database of more than 5,300 news articles from 81 countries about these encounters, and found 47% had factual errors and 43% were sensationalistic.
They also found stories that quoted spider experts tended to be more accurate than those that quoted medical experts of pest control specialists, who don’t receive the same level of training.
Negative media portrayals of spiders, snakes and other animals that many people tend to dislike hurt efforts to conserve species that play an important role in the ecosystem, the study authors say.

The prevalence of political and scientific misinformation in the media is a hot-button topic these days, and rightfully so — it has serious negative consequences for society. Emerging research shows that not even the animal kingdom is safe from the dangers of misinformation: a new study has quantified the global spread of misinformation about spiders, yielding clues about how to stem the flow of falsehoods.

The research, posted as a pre-print and currently under peer review, is the product of a massive effort by more than 60 scientists around the world led by ecologist Stefano Mammola of the Italian National Research Council. They compiled a database of 5,348 news articles about human-spider encounters from 81 countries and written in 41 languages.

Study co-author Catherine Scott, a postdoctoral fellow at the Lyman Entomological Museum at McGill University in Canada, agrees. “People love to hate spiders. They occupy this place in our minds, and I think it has something to do with how different they are from us. They’re almost alien … they have eight legs, they have lots of eyes, they move in an erratic way,” they explained, noting that even some entomologists, scientists who study insects (which have six legs), are afraid of the eight-legged animals. Scott said they empathize with people who fear spiders. As a child and teenager, they were also arachnophobic, to the point that they couldn’t be in the same room with a spider. But their fear turned to curiosity when they had the opportunity to research black widow spider communication as an undergraduate student. After observing the spiders’ sophisticated behaviors and communication systems, Scott “very rapidly switched from being arachnophobic to arachnophilic [spider-loving].” And there is a lot to love about these animals: spiders fill an important ecological role as predators of household and agricultural pests. A 2017 study estimated that the world’s spiders collectively devour 400 million to 800 million metric tons of insects and other tiny prey each year. Today, Scott is a spider scientist who focuses on combating misinformation about these creatures. “It’s a constant frustration for me as an arachnologist to see sensationalized media stories, to see information being spread on the internet that is false,” they said. Scott even started a Twitter project called #RecluseOrNot to correct misinformation about brown recluse spiders on social media. Mammola said he hopes to apply the same methodology from this spider study to articles about other animals like scorpions and jellyfish to see if they’re also subject to the same level of misinformation. In the meantime, a simple piece of advice should suffice for anyone who consumes news or social media: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.