The thing about my job is that people ask me to debunk all sorts of nonsense. When you get to the bottom of some of these, you find yourself with a mouthful of cobwebs. And a snack.
Today’s Moment of Science… Exactly how many spiders do you eat in your sleep?
Not to be confused with coprophagy (which comes up here just a tad too often), entomophagy is the practice of eating insects. While it’s entirely common throughout the animal kingdom, the practice is hit or miss in our species. An estimated 3,000 ethnic groups partake in these crunchy chitinous delicacies, and though the percentage is debated it’s believed that 25-30% of humans munch on mealworms and other crawlies as part of a balanced diet.
We haven’t all gotten on board with the idea though.
The main argument against the practice amounts to “ick” and some hand waving about “liberals aren’t taking away muh burgers,” which… just fucking relax, Chester, we’ll get there after we get serious about the guns.
Much like with other critters we intend to swallow, they’re raised like the itsiest of farm animals. There are plenty of advantages to insects as livestock. In general, they tend to be better controlled for disease than taking your chances with scrounging up caterpillars from a random bit of forest. They require less land, water, and overall resources than other sources of protein. Some species are processed as eggs or larvae, while others are raised to be big fat adult bugs to better enjoy every last thoracic crunch. Mmm, locusty goodness.
Some bugs are fated to be freeze dried and pulverized for consumption in flour form. It unfortunately came as very little surprise that while there are people eating this because it’s all they have, other less scrupulous folks are making a killing in the ant powder superfood market (my band name).
Over 2,000 edible insect species have been identified, but I’m not sure if all bugs that are technically edible meet palatability standards. So if perhaps the cockroaches cocktail appetizer isn’t for you, the common house cricket burger may be to your liking. I’ve tried a box of salt and vinegar crickets. To be fair, I closed my eyes for the first bite. I would have thought they were sunflower seeds if I hadn’t known better. They were tasty, and I’d have them again. I’m not sure I would have tried salt and vinegar spiders.
Speaking of. That rumor.
Did you hear that you eat seven spiders in your sleep?
Wait… is it in your sleep every night, in a year, or in your entire life?
No matter, because it’s fucking bullshit. Not just because there’s no evidence that it’s happened, but because that’s just not how spiders work.
Spiders tend to avoid our beds because there’s not a lot in the way of snacks in there (unless you’ve got bedbugs, in which case you’d be thrilled to see a goddamn spider). While sleeping, spiders more or less see us like great terrible vibrating hills. We’re not particularly interesting and the signal we give when our snoring makes ground shake under a spider’s bitsy legs is more of a ‘skedaddle’ than a ‘come hither.’
“But Ms. Auntie SciBabe, I know someone who woke up with a spider on them, so it happens.” Yes, and I know somebody who fucked an Avenger. But ‘can happen anecdotally’ is a smidge short of ‘definitely happens to everyone seven times a night’ (or year or lifetime or whatever). Furthermore, a spider on the face is quite different from the unfortunate arachnid deciding to take eight treacherous steps into the loudest face hole.
Surely the cause of some poor innocent spider’s death has involved an accidental tumble down someone’s blow hole while they were sleeping. But spiders are mostly going to leave you alone, awake, asleep, or otherwise. So you can sleep soundly, knowing we’ve put this urban legend to bed.
This has been your Moment of Science, absolutely turning all of my friends’ absurd pop culture questions into columns now.
I did have a hobo spider in my bed with me. I know, as I found its remains around where my calves were and was envenomated in one calf, likely when I accidentally crushed it.
Given the dearth of insects in my bed and the local environment being quite deep south warm, it likely got trapped when we had made the bed that morning.
The calf took around six months to fully heal, no eschar, but a depressed necrotic layer was present that remains today as a mildly darker, depressed region the size a bit larger than a quarter (anything to avoid the metric system and conversions/explanations).*
*I’ve mentioned to some that the rest of the planet uses the metric system, to get a retort back that “everyone else’s doing it ain’t no excuse”. To which I replied, “The rest of the world breathes oxygen, want to provide a superior example and breathe hydrogen cyanide?”. The conversation invariably devolves from that point onward. Maybe I’ll suggest pure nitrogen next time.