I heard that in a lifetime an average person will swallow 11 spiders in their sleep. Anyone know if this is true?
What I want to know is how anyone could possibly figure that out?
What, do they have a team of scientists that show up at your door early in the morning and demand to inspect your teeth to see if any crunchy arachnid bits remain? And then take the results of said random sampling and apply it to the population as a whole?
Do they have a legion of volunteers who sleep with Nocturnal Arachnid Obstruction Gathering Devices over their mouths, and then go about tabulating the number of spiders caught trying to enter the sleepers’ mouths? Are the spiders then released to the wild?
Or could it be that someone just pulled this number out of their butt and wrote it up in a way that sounds like one of those lame, yet intruiging factoids that we are so enamored of?
Anyone? . . . . Bueller? . . .
I heard it, too, and it sounds reasonable. Think of all the people living in the tropics and warm climates. There must be small spiders crawling around most nights in people’s houses (or shacks).
How could this number be gotten though? Scientific study? Random sampling of the world’s population? I don’t know how or why experts could determine this number. Mabye entomologists do these sort of studies?
I think you’re right on the money! For a start, I’ve heard the same claim made but with different numbers (4 spiders) which immediately makes my UL detector light up.
However, here’s how I would do it:
-
Firstly take a survey of a few thousand people to see how many of them have been woken by a wriggling spider in their mouths. Note their ages and how often this has happened to each.
-
Take a large number of volunteers and deliberately introduce spiders into their mouths when they’re asleep. (Anyone out there interested?) See how often this wakes them up.
Now you know what fraction of nighttime spider-eating incidents actually wake people, you are in a position to estimate from your survey how many spiders people eat in their lifetime. If I get enough volunteers my Nobel prize can’t be far away!
I think you’re right on the money! For a start, I’ve heard the same claim made but with different numbers (4 spiders) which immediately makes my UL detector light up.
However, here’s how I would do it:
-
Firstly take a survey of a few thousand people to see how many of them have been woken by a wriggling spider in their mouths. Note their ages and how often this has happened to each.
-
Take a large number of volunteers and deliberately introduce spiders into their mouths when they’re asleep. (Anyone out there interested?) See how often this wakes them up.
Now you know what fraction of nighttime spider-eating incidents actually wake people, you are in a position to estimate from your survey how many spiders people eat in their lifetime. If I get enough volunteers my Nobel prize can’t be far away!
I think you’re right on the money! For a start, I’ve heard the same claim made but with different numbers (4 spiders) which immediately makes my UL detector light up.
However, here’s how I would do it:
-
Firstly take a survey of a few thousand people to see how many of them have been woken by a wriggling spider in their mouths. Note their ages and how often this has happened to each.
-
Take a large number of volunteers and deliberately introduce spiders into their mouths when they’re asleep. (Anyone out there interested?) See how often this wakes them up.
Now you know what fraction of nighttime spider-eating incidents actually wake people, you are in a position to estimate from your survey how many spiders people eat in their lifetime. If I get enough volunteers my Nobel prize can’t be far away!
Something tells me matt won’t be convincing any ladies to sleep over any time soon…
Mmmmmmmmmmm…spidery! 
“I don’t know…I don’t know.” – St. DooDah
We already answered this & Im too lazy to search. Its more like 5 or 6 per night.
Yes, you really do eat them.
Yes, they are spiders.
They are commonly called bed mites.
Happy sleeping.
While mites are arachnids they are not spiders.
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you.
Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
Mostly it depends on how you cook them. If you serve some cous-cous or a nice rice pilaf you can usually get away with one spider per guest.
Personally, I tell them it is soft-shelled crab and not to count the legs hanging over the bun.
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”
I know an old lady who swallowed a spider.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, but I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.
I guess she’ll die.
Alph, surely you jest:
arach•nid \e-"rak-ned, -'nid\ noun [NL Arachnida, fr. Gk arachne spider] (1869)
: any of a class (Arachnida) of arthropods comprising chiefly terrestrial invertebrates, including the spiders, scorpions, mites, and ticks, and having a segmented body divided into two regions of which the anterior bears four pairs of legs but no antennae
arachnid adjective
©1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Well, maybe the fact that you’re swallowing spiders is symptomatic of something. Perhaps they are being attracted to flies. How’s your morning breath? If your breath is that bad, then it’s no wonder you’re getting all these spiders, your mouth is Fly Central! Use a little Scope before you go to bed, that should clear it up. Or, alternatively, swallow a frog.
Heck is where you go when you don’t believe in Gosh.
handy, if you read my post carefully I acknowledged that mites are arachnids (as your dictionary entry supports). But I also noted that mites are not spiders, which contradicts your claim that “Yes, they are spiders. They are commonly called bed mites.”
I stand by my original statement. While spiders have two distinct body parts (the cephalothorax and the abdomen), the body of a mite has only a single region.
Mites, like scorpions and ticks, are arachnids but not spiders.
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you.
Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
Alph, I thought we were talking about frying pans? Also, I can’t look that close at a mite to see how many segments it is 
spi•der "spi-der\ noun [ME spyder, alter. of spithre; akin to OE spinnan to spin] (15c)
1 : any of an order (Araneae syn. Araneida) of arachnids having the abdomen usu. unsegmented and constricted at the base, chelicerae modified into poison fangs, and two or more pairs of abdominal spinnerets for spinning threads of silk used in making cocoons for their eggs, nests for themselves, or webs to catch prey
2 : a cast-iron frying pan orig. made with short feet to stand among coals on the hearth
3 :
All the more reason to be careful about the facts you post.
Something is fishy here…it is not yet the tenth of March and yet Alphagene has managed to reply on that day. What clock is wrong? Or did you actually reply in the future and send it back to us?
It’s just a snag after the crash… it’s worked itself out. UncleBeer and I bitched about it briefly in two separate threads in ATMB.
Maybe it’s the SPIDERS that they’re pulling out of their butt. (cymbal crash!!)
THANK YOU!
(tough crowd)
Sweet Basil
Didn’t get voted for a damn thing!
(thanks guys…)