I want toe believe!

An unbelievable story, originally by the BBC, was reported recently about a man who was told his toe infection was the result of a bite from a spider that subsequently laid its eggs inside him. There’s a lot to unpack here, and the story has many levels of implausibility packed into it. Let’s explore a bit, and use our brains to think, which the original reporters clearly did not bother to do.

The people involved are a man from the UK, his wife, the doctor on board his cruise ship, another doctor (presumably in the UK), and the stunningly credulous reporter.

The man reported to the ship’s doctor with a discolored, swollen toe. The doctor concluded that he had been bitten by a Peruvian wolf spider that laid its eggs in his toe. Oh, boy! Where to begin?

The man was having dinner in Marseille, France when he was supposedly bitten. Last I checked, France and Peru aren’t very close to each other.

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say this spider was also vacationing in France. Sure, why not?

I’ve written before about the unlikeliness of a spider actually biting someone, and how “spider bites” are routinely misdiagnosed by medical professionals. Long story short: unless you saw a spider bite you, odds are very low that you were bitten by a spider.

So, this guy was most likely not bitten by a Peruvian wolf spider. Let’s not even touch the fact that the doctor made that diagnosis without seeing a spider. Even if the man had brought a spider to the doctor, spider identification takes expert knowledge and often requires careful examination using a microscope.

If anyone from Peru is reading this, you are right to be enraged at this doctor for maligning your lovely wolf spiders. You have my sympathy!

The doctor also claimed that the spider had laid eggs in the man’s toe. This is impossible. Not unlikely. IMPOSSIBLE. Spiders do not have any way of inserting eggs into a substance, and no spiders lay their eggs in living organisms. A human toe would not be an appropriate place to insert eggs, even if they could.

Many spider wrap their eggs in silk, and wolf spiders FAMOUSLY carry their eggsacs attached to their bodies as a form of parental care.

This man’s toe was not full of spider eggs, but the doctor was certainly full of something. Shit. He was full of shit. If your doctor ever makes a conclusion that sounds odd, ask her how she came to that conclusion. In fact, ask your doctor about this whenever any decision is made. Having a medical degree does not make doctor’s all-knowing. They are humans, and liable to make errors or even false conclusions just to sound authoritative. Perhaps this doctor, if questioned about evidence for the spider egg diagnosis, would have said, “Well, there’s no actual evidence, but it seems plausible to me.”

Even if this man had encountered a Peruvian wolf spider while on a cruise to France, and even if it had bitten him to lay its eggs inside his toe, surely he would have felt something and sought medical care immediately instead of waiting for infection to set in, right?

Well, the man claims he was bitten during a meal, but didn’t feel it because spiders numb their prey before laying eggs. Right…

So, he seems to be thinking of vampire bats, leeches, or maybe a xenomorph? Spiders eat their prey, they don’t lay eggs in it. That’s just how prey works. It’s food. Spider venoms are complex cocktails of proteins, but they have not evolved to numb anything. Massive pain is likely inflicted on prey when they are bitten, so numbing makes no sense.

Think about it: would a spider numb a fly before regurgitating digestive fluids on it to render it’s tissues into a slurry?

Yes? “Here, little fly. Let me make you comfortable right before I annihilate you.”

Plus, even if spider venom numbed their prey (typically insects or other arthropods), there’s no good reason to expect the venom to have the same effect on humans.

An interesting detail in the story: the man’s wife thought his toe was likely infected because he was wearing new sandals that irritated his skin. What?! Is she INSANE? How could she have come to such an absurd conclusion?

Anyway, the story continues:

The ship’s doctor lanced his toe, releasing pus. This is what happens when a toe is infected! Score one for his wife. Apparently, included with the pus was something resembling...tea leaves.

I’m not a doctor, but that sounds like a horrifying infection. I know people from the UK like their tea, but this is extreme. The tea leaf-like things, we are to believe, turned out to be spider eggs.

It’s easy to see how any reasonable person could confuse tea leaves for spider eggs. They’re nearly identical!

Incidentally, I believe each are both equally likely to spill forth from a person’s infected toe.

The man sought medical care again in the UK, and antibiotics reduced the swelling of his toe. Antibiotics, FAMOUSLY, are used to treat infection. Score two for his wife, and, you know, reason.

We’re also told the marks left by the spider’s fangs were visible once the swelling went down. This is a classic misunderstanding: finding a couple red marks at the site of infection does not mean those marks were left by a spider’s fangs. Most spiders have fangs too close together to leave distinct marks, and the ones that have fangs far enough apart are quite large spiders. You would certainly not have to guess that you were bitten by a large spider, because...you would see and feel a large spider biting you!

The story continues: Presumably, a single spider egg was missed from the initial procedure, and hatched inside his toe. Furthermore, we’re told it was working on eating its way out of him.

Yikes, just yikes.

There is no way a spider egg could develop inside a human being. That’s not how biology works. There’s also no way a hatched spiderling could eat its way towards the surface of the skin within an infected toe. They lack the anatomy and physiology necessary for this, because, and follow my detailed explanation carefully here, THEY ARE NOT PARASITES.

We’re informed that the doctor killed the spider with antibiotics and removed it from his toe. Huh, why would you kill a spider with antibiotics? Perhaps, and I’m just throwing out ideas here, perhaps THERE WAS NO SPIDER IN THE FIRST PLACE. This man had an infection, and the infection was treated successfully with antibiotics. The end, nothing to see here, please move along.

The man apparently asked if he could keep the spider, but was not allowed to do so. I think there are only two possible interpretations of this final piece of the story: 1) this man is a liar or otherwise delusional about what happened, or 2) the doctors had to follow top secret protocol and whisk the toe spider off to a secret government lab for quarantine and further testing. It’s ability to defy all modern knowledge of spider biology must indicate that it is of extra-terrestrial origin.

So, if your toe is infected, please consider the most obvious explanation before buying into an absurd narrative that flies in the face of reason.