3/15/2024 0 Comments Are ground spiders poisonousA bite can result in such damage to the skin and underlying tissue that it leaves a large and ugly scar. Its venom contains particularly large quantities of sphingomyelinase D, an enzyme that cleaves sphingomyelin, a compound in cell membranes. The Chilean recluse spider is also considered to be the most dangerous of all the 100 or so members of the Loxosceles genus. It is easy then to see how a population could thrive, feeding on tiny insects in the quiet, dark, climate-controlled basement of a museum. Each female can turn out up to fifteen egg sacs in its lifetime and each egg sac will typically contain between 50 and 150 eggs. One spider – a female – lived without food or water for 755 days. But 14 females survived total starvation for an average of 453 days. Then he withdrew all food and water, testing their ability to withstand starvation. When a female spider he’d captured in the Sierra Madre outside LA gave birth to 48 spiderlings, he reared each of the offspring in isolation, feeding them on a diet of mealworms and other assorted insects until they reached maturity. “In the 1960s, the museum had some live rodents for research purposes and their enclosure was dressed with wood chips originating from South America,” he says. But Muona has an alternative explanation. In his paper, Huhta advanced the theory that the recluse spider had made it to Finland in a consignment of apples from Argentina. As it turned out, the creatures were just waiting to inhabit the newly excavated space. This caused some concern among the staff, many of whom had become attached to the eight-legged visitors. The project involved excavating down two floors to create new storage space and there was so much disruption that the spiders seemed to have disappeared for a time. “It was demolished in 2004 when we renovated the building,” says entomologist and senior curator Jyrki Muona. I fancy a peek inside the cupboards of the staff kitchen, but in preparation for my night at the museum, I discover that it no longer exists. He and his fellow curators removed around a dozen specimens from the cupboards and drawers in the staff kitchen, but within a few days the spiders were replaced by new ones “apparently coming from spaces beneath and behind the cupboards”. “In a small kitchen room the spider was exceptionally abundant,” wrote ecologist Veikko Huhta, who published a paper on the infestation in 1972. There were spiders everywhere in cupboards and drawers, on desks and shelves and behind pictures on the walls. Following a sudden explosion of sightings in the winter of 1970, they decided to carry out a systematic search, which revealed an infestation on the whole ground floor of the building. In around 1963, curators became aware of the presence of some kind of exotic spider in the museum. As I squeeze past an alpaca-like creature, I have mixed emotions, simultaneously impressed by the softness of its fur and troubled by the thought that the coat of a South American mammal might be a particularly suitable hang out for a Chilean recluse spider. Granroth proceeds with confidence, opening a huge drawer and lifting up sheet after sheet of plasterboard, clambering over a pile of wooden planks and getting down on his knees to shine a light beneath a cupboard. The room is not currently open to the public and is being used as a storage space, filled with packing crates, foam board, picture frames and a menagerie of stuffed animals, including a buffalo, a couple of battling zebra, a springbok and an ostrich with its slender neck taped to a metal stand. “This brought in a lot of insects and the spiders had a field day.” A recent exhibition involved bringing some tree trunks into the room, he says. Taxidermist Janne Granroth unlocks the door to the temporary exhibition space on the ground floor. And no one really knows how it got there. But for more than 50 years, it has also been home to a thriving population of the Chilean recluse spider ( Loxosceles laeta), widely considered to be the most venomous of its kind. I am on the hunt for a deadly spider.Īs is fitting for a national institution, the museum boasts a significant collection of botanical, zoological, geological and palaeontological specimens from all around the world. It is close to midnight as I enter the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki by a back door.
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