Spider news roundup
/It's been a while since my last update on spiders in the news, so I'll give a brief rundown of some of the stories that caught my eye over the past couple weeks.
Spider found baked into cookie
http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/wabc/images/cms/1508614_630x354.jpg
Spiders show up in produce (grapes, apples, bananas) with some regularity, though it is more rare to find them in processed food. This one managed to not just sneak into the packaging somewhere down the production line, but was actually incorporated into the food. As is often the case with these events, the store offered a refund and the customer was indignant, alluding to some permanent psychological trauma from nearly consuming something with a little extra protein in it. Entomophagy may very well become a new reality for us, though I think death by drowning in batter or being baked alive while stuck in batter sounds pretty horrible. Not the way I plan to go, but, when I think about it, I'm not sure how many opportunities exist for that situation to play itself out...
Spider “causes” car to go for a swim
Stories like this one have come across my spider news radar in the past, and they often involve personal injuries. Fortunately, this one was fairly self-contained. A woman leaped from her car, which was near a river and probably in gear, to get a spider off of her. The car slowly rolled into the river, which a witness described as happening “in slow motion”, a wholly appropriate was to describe the motion of a thing moving slowly. That is unless the witness actually saw the slowly moving car in slow motion, perhaps experiencing what really lasted a few seconds as an hour-long drama, full of tension, plot twists, and dramatic third act. The article is short, so there's no real way to diagnose whether the witness was actually in an elevated psychological state that makes time appear to slow down during life-threatening situations. Perhaps the witness was very concerned about the spider's safety?
Woman falls off couch
Ok, this one is pretty weak. She saw a spider, jumped on her couch to get away from it, and then fell off. She managed to break a bone in her foot, which I have trouble wrapping my head around. It's not clear if she trying to land some kind of karate move on it, though she should know that spider-grasshopper interactions typically favor the former.
I was surprised that Mirror didn't have a ridiculous, clickbait headline as the often do. This one could have easily been: “You won't believe how this woman DESTROYED her leg after confronting a venomous killer spider!”. I'm not sure if I'm happy they maintained some semblance of reason in their reporting or if I'm disappointed they didn't go nuts with this one. I'm all for factual, level-headed writing, but I should be able to find the crazy stuff reliably. I'm sure they'll get it right next time.