The Tarantula Wronged

Like many arachnidists, Cooke is upset about public attitudes toward spiders, particularly tarantulas. In an interview, conducted in the presence of several very large live and hairy tarantulas, he pointed out that while they can inflict a moderately painful bite when angry, they are not venomous.

"I wouldn't let my 4-year-old son keep one as a pet if they were," he said.

Their bad name, he added, can be traced to the region around Taranto, in southern Italy, from which they take their name. This is the habitat of the true, or European Tarantul, whose bite was said to induce tarantism.

Webster's New International Dictionary defines tarantism as: "A nervous affection characterized by melancholy, stupor, and an uncontrollable desire to dance."

The traditional treatment was to encourage the victim to dance wildly until the effects of the poison wore off. Thus evolved the wild Neapolitan folk dance, the tarantella. According to Cooke, who is writing an article on the subject for Natural History magazine, musicians wandered through the fields at harvest time, ready to offer their services to a victim of tarantula bite.

Interestingly, it has recently been shown that even the European tarantula has been wrongly accused, that it does not inflict the dreaded bite attributed to it but is quite harmless. The real culprit in tarantism is none other than the famous black widow spider. The black widow, Latrodectus mactans, is a comparatively small, inconspicuous, and secretive member of the family Theridiidae, the comb-footed spiders. These include several common cobweb-spinning spiders found in buildings. Latrodectus, whose name comes from the Greek and means "secret biter," is a genus of world-wide distribution containing several species. Although all are highly venomous, only L. mactans is synanthropic, posing a serious threat to people.