Spider Myth Resources

General Information

• The American Arachnological Society: The largest organization of professional arachnologists. Site includes instructions for submitting arachnid questions to experts.
• The American Tarantula Society: This site includes a number of illuminating online articles. See especially the one on how misinformation gets into kids' books and the one about scorpion myths.
• Jumping Spiders (a section of The Tree of Life web site): Photos of the jumping spiders (family Salticidae) of the world, arranged according to the hierarchy of technical classification.
• Australian Spiders Info and Links
• The World Spider Catalog: A technical resource for the serious arachnologist, listing all named spider species mentioned in recent literature.
• North American Spider Lists: This new project of the American Arachnological Society provides checklists of named spider species of the USA and Canada, replacing the now-defunct "Nearctic Spider Database."

Regional Resources

• Spiders of the Arid Southwest
• Spiders of Texas
• Ohio Spider Survey
• Great Lakes Spider Database (Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois)
• Los Angeles Spider Survey
• California Spider Checklist (1979-2004)
• Orange County, California Spider Pictures
• Alabama Spider Checklist (2006)

Medically Important Spiders

• University of California Hobo Spider Page: This page contains some more recent information on the hobo spider, which has not been found in California. The old "hobo spider site" is obsolete.
• Nina Sandlin's Brown Recluse Page: This article from the American Medical Association is the sole fully accurate general brown recluse information resource I know of. Most of the others are so bad they make me cringe!
• eMedicine's Atrax Page: A fully authoritative medical account of Australian "funnel-web" envenomation, countering much of the hype on these spiders.
• Demystifying Spider Venom and Spider Bites: Survey of all proven medically important spiders by Dutch arachnologist Ed Nieuwenhuys.
• British Arachnological Society: Irresponsible British news media characterize false widow spiders (Steatoda spp.) as a horrible threat to life and limb; these articles give the facts about these practically harmless spiders.
  • False Widow Spiders, Spider and Harvestman Recording Scheme Website
  • False Widow Spiders, British Arachnological Society

Spider Myths

• Rick Vetter's Spider Pages
  • The “venomous daddy-longlegs” myth
  • The “brown recluse” myth
  • "Deadly" banana spiders in the news
• Several urban legends sites include spider material, but the above (compiled from other sites including www.snopes.com) is the most complete. What's more, they finally stopped calling spiders insects!
• The Spider Hugger: A blog devoted to debunking spider nonsense. He's on Twitter too (@SpiderHugger).
• Camel Spider myths debunked by National Geographic

About (and by) Rod Crawford

• Author's Home Page
• Spider Collector's Journal

Photo Sources:

• Markku Savela's biological images (mainly from Finland)
• Wikimedia Commons
• Vanderbilt University Bioimages

Other photos are used courtesy of the photographers (who retain all rights), as credited. The photos by Bob Thomson were given by him to Rod Crawford (author of this page); the J.W. Thompson Co. photo of a yellow flower spider and the Margaret Davidson drawing of a hobo spider belong to the Burke Museum. A few drawings are by the author, but most are adapted from public domain sources, either non-copyright or copyright expired. Many of the line drawings are by classic arachnologist James Henry Emerton (1847-1930) in his late 19th century works on New England spiders.