White-tailed Spider - Bites To Humans

Bites To Humans

White-tailed spiders wander about human dwellings and may be encountered unexpectedly, unlike the black house spider and the redback which are more often seen in a web. They may be responsible for a disproportionately high number of spider bites compared with other Australian spiders, because of their wandering habits. Of the 130 cases studied by Isbister and Gray, more than 60% of the victims had been bitten by spiders that had got into clothing, towels or beds.

The bite of white-tailed spiders has been wrongly implicated in cases of arachnogenic necrosis. The misassociation stems from a paper presented at the International Society on Toxinology World Congress held in Brisbane in 1982. Both white-tailed and the wolf spider were considered as candidates for possibly causing suspected spider bite necrosis, though it later turned that the recluse spider was the culprit in the reported cases from Brazil.

Following this initial report, numerous other cases implicated white-tailed spiders in causing necrotic ulcers. All of these cases lacked a positively identified spider—or even a spider bite in some cases. Additionally there had not been a case of arachnogenic necrosis reported in the two hundred years of European colonisation before these cases. Clinical toxicologist Geoffrey Isbister studied 130 cases of arachnologist-identified white-tailed spider bites, and found no necrosis or confirmed infections, concluding that such outcomes are very unlikely for a white-tailed spider bite. The major effects from a bite were local pain, a red mark, local swelling and itchiness; rarely systemic effects of nausea, vomiting, malaise or headache occurred. All these symptoms are generally mild and resolve over time.